Yes.

To make matters worse, the opioid epidemic is real; regardless of the cause, it’s not just war on drugs hysteria.

It ends up that opioids are terrible drugs. Aside from the obvious habit forming stuff, there’s things like hyperalgesia and central sensitization — long-term opioid use can screw up how your brain processes pain.

I witnessed the decline of opioids in the latter-half of the 2010s firsthand from the patient’s perspective. The response to these problems from the medical community was _sheer panic_. No one was concerned with “what are we going to do next”, it was just “we have to get these patients off of opioids”. Lots of people suffered. There were suicides. There were, as you mentioned, people who moved to street opioids. The whole thing was a fucking travesty.

Rolling up on a decade we’re just finally _starting_ to get a handle on this thing with responsible alternatives for pain management. The stench lingers; I think we will look back on this era with a similar lens to how we see surgeries before the work of Joseph Lister.