When it comes to social problems, we all need someone to blame. Regarding the very real problem of opiate addiction, which is perhaps finally starting to gain the attention it has long deserved (at least in the United States), there are “quite a lot of people, really”:
First there are the patients themselves. One should not speak ill of the dead, of course, but truth compels us to admit that sometimes they were not the finest flowers of humanity. And it is they, after all, who took the overdoses, either accidentally or deliberately. They knew what they were doing.
Moreover, some of them had either intimidated or blackmailed their doctors into prescribing the drugs for them, when in a large number of cases they, the drugs, were not indicated in the first place. For doctors dependent on patients’ fees, the threat of withdrawal of custom may act as an incentive to prescribe. Patients may become threatening. There are also reliable reports of doctors prescribing for a fee without any medical indication whatever…