America's Growing Heroin Problem

The primary driver of heroin addiction in this country today is the ubiquity of prescription opiates like OxyContin and Fentanyl.  Pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies and doctors are all profiting handsomely from this scourge, and it must be stopped. 

America's growing heroin problem  

The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman has turned more attention towards America's growing heroin problem, where the gateway drug is often a prescription painkiller. From PBS Newshour: "Why more American…

http://kottke.org/14/02/americas-growing-heroin-problem

Historically, wars and the resultant exposure of a large number of people to morphine have been a driver and I don't doubt still a factor.  And of course America's military adventures typically drive . . . entrepreneurial entry into the drug trade.  Southeast Asia and opium in the 60s and 70s, Latin America and cocaine in the 70s and 80s, Afghanistan and it's opium today.

But this epidemic is being driven by Big Pharma profits.  We're kidding ourselves locking up the skels and low level bottom feeder dealers. It's the suits at Purdue Pharma and others who ought to be frogmarched off to prison.