Once the government and industry took measures to try to reign in the pills, ODs starting rising dramatically as people turned to street drugs (sometimes dangerously spiked with Fentanyl without the consumer's knowledge).

I'm pretty sure we're agreeing now, but in your original comment you were saying more people would OD if it were legalized. Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal, but the data here shows more people OD when they can't procure it in normalized and knowable amounts.

Also, relying on a black market to stay high is likely to have other consequences on your life in all sorts of ways not related to the act of ingesting an illegal drug, but more the fallout from engaging in (by definition) illegal actions to make it possible for you to ingest the drug. This complication is likely to further, rather than reduce, risk-taking behaviors that are not organic using the substance itself. When combined with the general volatility of the the market in general given chaotic measures that temporarily create false scarcity for a product that someone suffering from addiction cannot fathom going without, individual behaviors and decision making will definitely be negatively affected.

Basically the argument for the criminalization of drug use/commerce is:

Drugs are addicting and can be abused, so we decided to criminalize them with penalties that may seem excessive but are definitely warranted. And you know what? After putting this in place, man, you should see just how dangerous these drugs actually turned out to be. Turns out, once you make drug users criminals, they start committing more crimes and they lose their jobs and neglect their children and started overdosing and end up in jail and on a macro level violent organizations have come into being with the means to subvert whole nation states and law enforcement has a whole lot more to do. Could you imagine the anarchy if we legalized this shit? Overdoes would go up, violent organizations would take over the world, a whole generation of kids will be fucked and our prisons would be bursting from addicts committing crimes while law enforcement would collapse from being underfunded and stretched too thin.

Don't get me wrong, I believe drugs are Stupid, it's just the consequences of making them illegal is like Stupid started doing drugs and then began committing crimes to pay for the price Stupid artificially inflated against it's own interests so that it could in fact continue claiming to stupidly be trying to be less Stupid while (with near preternatural stupidity so sublime it becomes indistinguishable from Genius) preventing itself from ever being anything other than just Stupid while also convincing everyone it doesn't have a problem, in fact anyone who even stupidly suggests that what Stupid is doing to Stupid is Stupid is themselves in fact Stupid for suggesting something so Stupid.