Yes, and Germany has a significantly higher quality of life than the US. You think that's a bad thing somehow?
The one thing I do have a problem with is that europe has managed to engineer its population into a situation in which the majority of folks are forced into positions where they can't move out of welfare even if they wanted to, in a reasonable fashion.
In my opinion, both healthcare and internet access have achieved utility status.
This sentence has a ton of negative connotations, so yes you did allude that it may be a bad thing. Sorry, had to call you out.
People were seeing doctors who were over-prescribing opiates, making them cheap and readily available. The DEA (federal Drug Enforcement Administration) cracked down and suddenly these highly addictive prescription opiates were severely constrained, which increased demand for cheap heroin.
Now heroin has replaced prescriptions as the cheap and readily available opiate.
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.
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.)
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.