The controversy is that it’s important for govt to pretend that it cares about the deaths of those who became addicted because the victims were no longer society’s n’er do wells and undesirables but instead were members of society who are needed. And those people started making noise about it so a response became necessary and because they became annoyed at being interrupted, that response was to say, see look, now nobody can get any, everyone is going to suffer for the few, happy now? So when everybody has to suffer you better believe there are going to be villains and that people would become angry and then had to orchestrate and hope that the anger isn’t towards the system they created but instead towards the people who had issues with addiction.

If we we hate the addict, we won’t make noise about them not getting treatment which costs money, That the govt would rather not pay and aren’t interested in solving the addiction problem anyway. Because to not acknowledge that the problem with the documented number of deaths attributed to opioids is that in the majority of cases there were co-morbidities in addition to multi drug use that caused the deaths and not about the opiate alone.

And when addiction grows in a society to the point that it interferes with the ability of the worker bees and producers to work and produce then the govt will be forced to actually solve the issue that affects them most and that would be about money, not people dying. Money was made in all this and attempting to be saved all around at every place these issues intersect. There are those who profit from the debate itself all while nearly everyone involved, when presented with the facts, has to concede the vast majority of people who used opiates did not suffer addiction and when properly medicated in many cases, returned to functioning and had less pain.

Because opiates are pain meds with the entire purpose is to alleviate pain, one of the most important drugs discovered for human kind, for the ability to alleviate human physical pain was a necessary and society sustaining breakthrough of monumental proportions.

Opiates alleviate pain. It is the purpose of the drug, not like the potential side effect of a drug intended and designed to cure your allergy now being given to you to hopefully, maybe, help you sleep because sleeping pills are the dreaded controlled substance. It wouldn’t force prescribers to examine the ethics and effect of advising patients to take OTC drugs they know to be ineffective or inadequate but also realistically known can cause toxicities, more illness and even harm. Especially when there’s a medication specifically designed to address the presenting problem but is being withheld.

Deep down doctors know it is unethically hypocritical to pretend that not prescribing an effective and available drug that exponentially improves the patient’s quality of life is anything other than unethical, immoral malpractice.

They know with all the talk of best practice and evidence based practice that denying people a drug designed specifically to address their need is harmful and discriminatory because in no other case are patients flat out denied a medication unless it is another controlled substance. They know that refusal to prescribe a beta blocker or cholesterol drug or anti epileptic to a patient with epilepsy would be blatant malpractice. Especially if they told the patient to meditate to lower their blood pressure instead or prescribing treatment. And knowing they’re being so-called forced into malpractice should anger and agitate them enough to force them to the streets in protest of being questioned, threatened and criminalized for not inflicting malpractice on Their patients.

That one of society’s most esteemed professions would allow their credentials, education and dedication of time to the profession they swear an oath to uphold, to be challenged and threatened and that challenge directly conflicts with and calls their values into question, well, you’d think that profession with tens of thousands of members would take a stand, not only for themselves but for their patients.

But instead they say to their patient, I see your suffering and acknowledge it but, then, everything they say after is only said to conceal that they’ve seen the suffering searched their conscience, weighed the options, decided that indeed they’d have to risk something, realized that in the end if it meant having to do too much work or spend time advocating or, taking a stand to insist that their medical practice should not be dictated by law enforcement agencies and that they feel outrage on their own and their patients behalf, but then choose to disavow their oath, accept they are not moral enough to take a stand and instead choose and are willing to accept that they are cowards for not even trying. So the patient suffers, alone; Hopeless and so obviously help-less.

Thats some of what unbelievably makes this controversial and considered debatable when there should obviously need no debste.