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I used to like that video but it hasn’t aged well. The whole opioid epidemic showed how you can make addicts out of lots of people through getting them physically addicted.

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Do we know that people affected by the opioid epidemic are not otherwise affected too? For example, given the past experiences that I mentioned previously, I could see how if I had been on opioids at the time, that I could have perhaps become addicted. In general, we're living in a more technologically connected but physically and mentally disconnected lonelier world, I remember reading something here on HN not that long ago about this, it doesn't at all surprise me that many otherwise normal seeming people would be prone to addiction. Most of us don't show our struggles publicly, but we still fight with them. More of us are damaged in some way than we like to admit, we see it often where some person who seemed like they had it together suddenly does something seemingly out of character (like suicide).

Having said that, I don't think its completely contradictory to the video that some level of purely physical addiction can exist too, (I know he doesn't say it, though), just that in the majority of cases there's perhaps a deeper reason. More people on opioids obviously makes a smaller percentage more visible.

But at the end of the day, I'm only speculating either way, I don't know, I'm not a doctor, pharmacist, chemist, psychologist or anyone else who might know, so... grain of salt and all that.

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