And why did they over-prescribe opioids? Because getting surgery was prohibitively expensive?
Doctors, in general, are doctors because they wanted to be doctors. Some of them may be in it for the money, but if you are really in it for the money, you become a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, not a primary care physician in Buttfuck, Idaho - where all the rural heroin epidemic victims are.
Sure, some countries hand out opioids more freely than others, but in spain, Codeine is prescription free. Walk into a pharmacy, say you want codeine, you get codeine. I don't see an opioid epidemic in spain. If ease of access was the driving factor behind opioid abuse, spain should be all about opioid abuse. Codeine may not be the most potent opioid in the universe, but it is what it is.
I think its the surgery thing. Because if you fuck up your spine and are in perpetual pain and also cant work anymore which just makes the problem worse because then you cant even afford the morphine, maybe taking the morphine isnt such a bad idea.
I'm not so sure about the surgery thing. I think it's really depair: in rural places in America, the economy is devastated. It's exactly why Trump was elected: he promised to bring all the jobs back (even though he won't, and can't even if he wanted to). Poorly-educated American ruralites can no longer have a decent quality of life, and frequently can't even find a job. They're not willing to move to the cities, so they get addicted to various drugs instead.
You're not seeing it in Europe because you don't have a gigantic portion of your population that's unemployed like we do. (Our official unemployment numbers are complete lies.)
Rural areas are getting wrecked by globalization everywhere. Not just the US. Spain, btw, is one of the prime examples. Yet no opioid addiction.
Assuming that people kinda decide to just do drugs because despair is a bit ridiculous. Theres always a reason to do drugs. Almost noone was born an addict, and if you reason that those addictions originated at doctors appointments (prescribed medicine), it was probably not some kind of recreational turned addict thing.
Or are you trying to argue that its the national sport of rural folks to go to their local doctor and check the opioid menu for the flavour of the month opioid to shoot up their vein because they're out of a job and feel despair about it? That sounds a bit far-fetched.
Doctors, in general, are doctors because they wanted to be doctors. Some of them may be in it for the money, but if you are really in it for the money, you become a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, not a primary care physician in Buttfuck, Idaho - where all the rural heroin epidemic victims are.
Sure, some countries hand out opioids more freely than others, but in spain, Codeine is prescription free. Walk into a pharmacy, say you want codeine, you get codeine. I don't see an opioid epidemic in spain. If ease of access was the driving factor behind opioid abuse, spain should be all about opioid abuse. Codeine may not be the most potent opioid in the universe, but it is what it is.
I think its the surgery thing. Because if you fuck up your spine and are in perpetual pain and also cant work anymore which just makes the problem worse because then you cant even afford the morphine, maybe taking the morphine isnt such a bad idea.