finally someone (other than us ;-) notices that these books present a flawed narrative about addiction, suggesting it is created by supply, which drives ineffective approaches like PDMPs & ignores pain nybooks.com/articles/2018/… see also cjr.org/covering_the_h… /1
while it might have been possible to reduce medical supply without creating the market for heroin that we did create, to do so, we would have had to provide instant access to maintenance medications, not just cut ppl off /2
instead, we just instituted PDMPs, CDC guidelines, "pill mill" prosecutions & numerous other supply side measures which contained the false assumption that if you just stop a prescription, you end an addiction.
and that, of course, led street suppliers to step in & create new, ongoing markets, which actually *grow* the more you squeeze the medical supply. & this predictably, even without fentanyls, increases OD death bc dose & purity are mostly unknowable.
with fentanyls, it becomes the utter public health disaster we are see now— for which the only real solution is.... more medical opioids, including but not limited to bupe & methadone. Worrying about "diversion" is a fatal diversion of effort when alternative is street fentanyls.
