I thank you for sharing your story and I can't even imagine the pain your wife and you went through.

I do think that even though there are dangerous drugs, there are costs to making the use more expensive or harder to get. All drugs have side effects and some are truly devastating and the best way to handle that risk/reward tolerance is talking to a provider and managing it. The same way some drugs create dependence, the lack of them also cause enormous pain, and their increased price also create inaccessibility.

There is definitely a rampant culture of consuming pharmacological products in the US: maybe there are things that are causing the US society to be so dependent on drugs that can be addressed.