Blaming Everyone Else

Here's Betsey McCaughey on the opioid "epidemic":  "On Face the Nation, Governor Christie, chairman of Trump’s opioid commission, blamed over-prescribing doctors. “This crisis started not on a street corner somewhere. This crisis started in the doctor’s offices and hospitals of America.” That’s untrue, Governor. It contradicts scientific evidence and lets drug abusers off the hook. At least three quarters of opioid pill abusers and almost all heroin addicts got hooked without ever having been prescribed pain medication for an injury or illness, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Emergency room records show only a fraction — 13% — of opioid overdose victims began taking drugs because of pain, according to the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

The press features many stories about patients who needed pain killers and later became addicts, but these are exceptions, not the rule. Experimenting with opioids — whether heroin or pills — is almost always a choice. A bad choice."

I am so glad to see more articles like this.  Place the blame where it belongs: with the abusers, not with the doctors or with the medications, both of which help the rest of us!