Opioid Epidemic, Are Doctors At Fault?

Every year's thousands of Americans are overdosing on opioids. There is a constant debate over who is to blame for this crisis. One of the most heavily debated topics is whether doctors are at fault for creating the crisis.
 The opioid crisis started in the '90s when big pharmaceutical companies began advertising opioids are all-purpose pain killers. Prior to this time doctors only prescribed opioids to patients with severe chronic pain and patients who were dying. The pharmaceutical companies downplayed the addictive nature of the drugs and convinced doctors and patients that opioids were safe pain relief drugs. Pharmaceutical reps also using unethical forms of marketing to convince doctors to buy and promote their drugs. They would pay for the doctors to go on fancy vacations or pay them to be a speaker. Because of the aggressive and misleading advertising doctors began to prescribe more and more opioids. They also began prescribing more opioids because of their moral obligations as doctors to reduce pain. Once word spread about the effectiveness of opioids pateints also bgean to request opioids. Doctors began giving patients who didn't really need opioids, opioids to reduce their pain. The opioids proved to be very effective and once the word spread patients began requesting opioids. As a result, more and more people were using opioids and putting themselves at risk for addiction. Many doctors also overprescribed opioids. They gave patients much too high a dosage and would refill prescriptions when it wasn't necessary. Many doctors also failed to check the medical history of patients before prescribing them these highly addictive drugs. Patients with a history of addiction were able to obtain highly addictive drugs and often became addicted to them. Doctors who ran "pill mills", which are sites where people can obtain opioids from doctors without having to go through the proper examinations, gave thousands of people access to very dangerous drugs. Not only does giving the patients opioids put the patient at risk for addiction but is also stalks their home with a highly addictive drug. This gives their friends and family access to the drugs as well and can put them at risk for addiction. Because so many addictions started in the doctor's office many people blame doctors for creating the opioid crisis. They say that doctors shouldn't have been prescribing so many opioids and should have done better background checks before prescribing opioids to patients. They also say that they should have known that the drug was addictive and so they shouldn't have been prescribing it.  However, others argue that it is the government and pharmacuetical companies fault. They say that pharmaceutical companies lied to the doctors and the public about the addictive nature of the drugs and as a result the doctors prescribing opioids didn't know how dangerous the drug they were presrcibing was. Others also say that the government's lack of regulations on drug adverstising allowed the pharmacuetical companies to mislead its audience. Whether doctors are to blame or not is a debate that will likely never end. However, what is clear, is that the opioid crisis is a serious issue that is devastating the country and something needs to be done to stop it.

https://thecrimereport.org/2018/12/12/are-pain-doctors-wrongly-taking-the-blame-for-the-opioid-crisis/