Did they? It seems the problems started when they started cracking down and people had to resort to street heroin, and later fentanyl to get pain relief. If there were an easy, legal way to get oxycontin, I bet the majority of the problems of people dying from fake oxycontin laced with fentanyl would go away overnight.
Purdue had a financial interest in selling more Oxycontin. They knowingly pushed doctors to prescribe the medication in a manner that encouraged addiction. They knowingly misled patients and doctors as to how addictive the medication was.
Cutting the supply off without any alternatives absolutely caused harm. However, that only serves as evidence that safe and legal means of procurement are better than illegal ones.
If there had been a network of state dispensaries to provide safe regulated doses and support, over-prescription could have been stopped without leaving the victims to fend for themselves.
There's a segment of junkies who don't want drug treatment, just to get high at all costs. I spend almost daily talking to people that are professionals in this area (not a junky myself, just related to medical providers) and it's an everyday occurrence that people will come in, completely trick the medical providers for a daily or whatever short-term fix they're allowed with minimal privileges, and then use it to supplant their black market addiction. You can let them pursue their dream at black market prices while they bust into cars and inject god knows what of random purity. I'd much rather they just be able to buy it for $0.10 at walmart and beg for a dime outside the gas station, and know exactly what they're getting.
I'm not disagreeing about access to treatment, but just to be clear I don't see much intersectionality there with stopping the black market. For so many of them it becomes "sweet I can buy my black market shit, plus get whatever the addiction center place offers me on top of that."
So then they're able to stockpile and hoard it and then what? they get this stash and then are able to exist in a land of plenty when previously there was famine. it's like money. if you don't have any, things are really rough. but if you have enough that you're swimming in it? well then you're able to step aside from earthly concerns like making rent, and can choose to invest it in causes you choose. For a junkie who's drug life is feast or famine, having default access to what they need and feeling safe allows them to move on with their lives and get past their addiction and into jobs and return to regular life and be contributing members of society.
No, because the drugs are only given out in the context of dying in the street. There's absolutely no provision for people who are addicted through accident, for instance, to achieve some safe supply while tapering off to avoid the street.
And the government has decided that drug users are on palliative care, that they're never expected to improve, so they can be given drugs that are likely to end or destroy their life without any concern for recovery. That sounds 'caring' but in areas without this assumption they actually do rescue many people from this death, making the 'caring' cities into uncaring hellholes for the addicted - where they go to die on the streets of a preventable death.
There is no fear of 'famine' because the people who are being given drugs are being given drugs for the rest of their life. There's no fear of running out because even if the government stopped the supply the street drugs are only a few dollars.
What these excess drugs do is 1) increase the amount of drugs the person is taking and/or 2) get sold outside of the drug cities, both of which increase the scope of the problem.
Also, druggies don't need money because they can just take whatever they want from stores and at most will be forced to give the item back. They're given food and shelter and drugs and can steal any luxury under $1000. (Not that they'd be punished above that, but the stores aren't required to sit and accept it - they can apply reasonable force to recover their goods.)
Diverted drugs become black market drugs. I'm sure the Mexicans are getting ultra pure fentanyl or being trained to make the pure shit from precursors. Somehow most of it ends up being stomped on by the time it reaches the consumer. That is to say just because it was pure when the junky got it, doesn't mean it was accurately represented to the end user or altered along the way. Black market diversion from treatment facilities seems non-ideal.
The problem is the stomping isn't uniform. Whatever's being used as an adulterant, the end product has chunks of adulterant, and chunks of fentanyl, and this is what ends up killing people, because they end up with a life ending sliver of fentanyl from the heterogeneous mixture of drugs.
Killing a few people with your supply is an actual sales tactic called 'Hot Shotting' (a term for a lethal dose). When dealers cut and package for delivery they'll make a few extra strong and give them to well-known junkies who will then overdose and potentially die, in the process proving who's selling strong drugs. "That must be good stuff, Kevin died from it and they barely revived Sue."
Not only are street drugs inherently unsafe, the dealers view their customers as so expendable they're willing to kill them for advertising.
To fix this we've got to switch to government supply, but only when we simultaneously wipe out the illegal supply and suppliers, so that we don't simply compound the problem. Our interventions are like antibiotics. They lose their power over time when misused. They're best employed heavily in a cocktail and used fully.
There's also nothing illegal about a 7 year old jumping into a rushing river or buying unregulated "research" chemicals on the internet. Same thing, isn't it?
The way 7 year olds are kept out of rushing rivers, or consuming black market dope, is they have a parent, guardian, foster caretaker, someone looking after them. It's illegal to neglect a child. Sending a 7 year old to buy you cigarettes arguably isn't neglect, letting them smoke cigarettes or research chemicals probably is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget