Stine: Fault for the opioid epidemic belongs with addicts

Taken from Thursday’s edition of KIRO Nights with Jack Stine.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is set to take on the top U.S. opioid distributors in a trial starting Monday, Nov. 15. The trial will be in King County Superior Court as part of a lawsuit filed by the attorney general’s office against the nation’s largest three opioid distributors — McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen — for their alleged role in the state’s opioid epidemic.

All of this suing that’s going on by the states, whether it’s Connecticut, Ohio, Texas, and now Washington state, is all for show. As someone who was an opiate addict, I believe I can say this: The person whose responsibility it was to be in charge of my health was me and my doctor.

As someone who was addicted to drugs, I fooled my doctor to give me more drugs. I fail to see how going after opioid companies, or distributors for that matter, is going to fix anything or offer any restitution to the victims of the opioid epidemic.

This is the government trying to shake down these companies to get more money for their coffers. The opioid crisis is on opiate addicts, and it’s on doctors. It’s not on companies like Purdue, Lilly, or the Sackler family.

People and doctors have known that opiates are addictive since the Harrison Tax Act. People have known this since post-Civil War, when America was replete with morphine addicts missing legs and arms. In fact, they had a term for it. They called opiate addicts, back in the day, “hoople heads” because they were smoking opium pipes. People have known, and doctors have known, for years that opiates are horrifically addictive. I fail to see how companies have not known this as well.

The doctors were playing stupid. They know just how addictive opioids can be, and it was on them to curtail opioid prescriptions.

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