No one said the body is perfect nor self regulating, it is not a mystical notion to observe that the body, given the right nutrition can heal itself...no need to do anything For it or in Spite of it, just work with it.

Allopathic medicine has Never done Anything good for me...it's only made matters worse and cause other problems to boot.
25 years away from their so called science has proven that to me. No colds, flu, pain, cancer, ebola...Nothing in 25 years!

Just hoppen the old ugly body of old ugly Carl holds out.
You want Mysticism?...knock on wood...laughing

That is exactly what is happening. The only drug "epidemic" is among those who take drugs to escape from their own lives, along with the epidemic of statism demanding to control us in the name of "mobilzing", "emergencies", and "crises" as the altruist-statists demand to sacrifice innocent people to drug junkies seeking escape from their own lives.

For all their blather about "mobilizing" against a "crisis" they never mention the harm they are causing to innocent people being made to unnecessarily suffer pain and pay the artificially escalating costs for pain medication as the statists take over the right of highly educated, dedicated doctors and other medical professionals to think and act within their own profession.

"There is no opioid epidemic"
It's every bit as real as our gun violence epidemic and healthcare crisis, i.e. not real.

I wonder what would happen if they just stopped the whole thing and went back to what we had 100 years ago, when you could just walk into a drug store and get your heroin in powder, tincture, or whatever format you wanted. Maybe it would be a disaster, but I actually think freed from the need to have a high potency, for smuggling purposes, you'd see people going to more easily measured doses and buying more long-acting opiods with less of a rush and crash. War proponents will say that some people might crash their car, get addicted, or run their lives, but that's happening now. The question is if it would happen more or less. And even if the problem got a little worse, how much war is worth stopping it. We could reduce drugs, kidnapping, robbery, etc if we instituted a police state with random searches of all houses and a need for papers granting permission to travel anywhere.

I really think it's a the phony emergency du jour. It's almost on the spectrum of "human traffic" kidnappings of ordinary people going about their normal daily business or "satanism" in the 80s-- complete fiction.

Opioid overdoses caused more than 42000 deaths in 2016, more than any previous year on record. In 2017 HHS declared a public health emergency to combat the crisis.

Unfortunately, the medical industry dropped the ball on opioid pain killers. They almost completely failed to warn patients of the hazards. And, there are hazards.

A little history helps in considering the investigation by the attorneys general. Starting in the mid-1970s, as Percocet and Vicodin started showing up in the medicine cabinet, doctors were being told the drugs could work wonders in managing pain. In 1980, a New England Journal of Medicine report stated that addiction shouldn’t be of concern. In the ’80s, pain-management specialists like Russell Portenoy were telling doctors and patients that opioid painkillers were safe and a more humane alternative to surgery.

In the ’90s, Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin debuted. Doctors started talking about doing a better job of treating pain. Purdue created a video promotion sent to doctors’ offices that showcased patients who had reclaimed their lives from chronic pain, and an expert in the videos claimed the drugs came without serious side effects.

Sales of the painkillers mushroomed, and during the first years of this century, pain management through opioid prescriptions became the expectation.

In 2011, Portenoy and others began reversing their recommendations as addictions to opioids, either prescription drugs or illegals like heroin, began to rise.

“Clearly,” Portenoy said, “if I had an inkling of what I know now then, I wouldn’t have spoken in the way that I spoke. It was clearly the wrong thing to do.”

More than 300,000 Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids since 2000. President Donald J. Trump has mobilized his entire Administration to address opioid abuse by directing the declaration of a nationwide Public Health Emergency.
A recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine suggests that it might be time to reexamine this issue, particularly the relationship between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry. Some of the findings are leaving many reeling and questioning whether or not they can even trust their own doctor. Among the more pertinent, and alarming, of the results is how easily doctors can be persuaded to prescribe drugs like brand-name statins (lipid and cholesterol-lowering medications) by pharmaceutical manufacturers. The research included nearly 2,500 physicians.

It is equally "stupid" for anyone to acquiesce, yet almost everyone does it. Everyone has an interest in the private economy and the success of business. They acquiesce, including big business, because they don't know any better; they have no understanding of what to advocate. Big business doesn't either, including the Kochs, who mostly fund politics. All of them are thinking short term as pragmatists. If the right philosophical ideas on behalf of reason, individualism and freedom are not spread intellectually this will not change.