> It's disheartening, to say the least, that one of the main strategies for dealing with this is apparently "reducing medical prescriptions of opioids". People are in pain -- they need to be helped.

While I pretty much agree with everything you say, I take a bit of issue with this.

Overprescription of opioids is a major factor for creating addicts in the first place, and in that regard, the US is a rather obvious outlier. [0]

Afaik the legalization of Cannabis has already helped with this overprescription trend of opioids [1] and that's a very good thing. If done right, the US could turn this around from being the worst offender to being a world leader in pain treatment research and sensible application.

Yes, that would require a rather big paradigm shift on the political level, one many would consider unthinkable. Just as unthinkable as the legalization of cannabis had been for very long periods in the US.

[0] https://qz.com/1198965/the-surprising-geography-of-opioid-us...

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/04/02/5987877...