> The harm to society of people who need them not getting pain drugs far outweighs the pain to society of those who don’t need them abusing them.
I can see the argument here morally (and I agree with it), but in practice I know far more people negatively affected by drug addictions and drug addicts than I know people unable to get pain management medication they need. I imagine my experience may be typical, and so I am unsurprised the pendulum has swung so far.
One question to ask yourself though is whether you're experience both confirmation bias and a bias brought about by visibility and/or age. If you're younger, you're less likely to know people with conditions that require pain management. Likewise the people around you suffering from such conditions might not be open about it because either they've already been told they just have to suck it up and live with the pain, or because they've learned that complaining/being assertive about their pain is a good way to get labeled an addict and get even worse treatment.
I was arguing that such a complaint will fall flat with many people if they share the same general experience as me. Not that it’s “objectively” true or false, assuming you can find something objective to measure. In fact I don’t think you can find something useful to measure objectively, and will necessarily fall back on subjective arguments about what is better, more important, more moral.
You'll pardon me for saying something that sounds a little "woo," but what will enlighten you the most is regarding Group B (who get opioids or benzos or whatever and suffer addiction) as a subset of Group A (who need treatment and medication but aren't getting it), namely that Group B is not getting something in their lives which they desperately need.
Then you may see the unitary flaw in the system, at perhaps a larger scale, wherein people are not receiving what they need. One "right-sized" problem, not two problems. Why addiction, or better, why addiction now, what has caused the rise in such? Whatever that need was, were it met, would prevent addiction and we might then cease adding yet one more special of lenses, mirrors, and films to our ever-evolving panopticon, one more trackable in the Salesforce of the Surveillance State.
We need to look at some reasons as to why people can see, say, Tranq in Philadelphia and say, "That looks like my best option, there."
I don’t disagree that addiction indicates a lack of something broadly related to “care”. I just take issue with claiming “it is necessarily better that people in pain receive care, and addicts do what addicts do”.
If this is indeed a spectrum (certainly debatable), with increased access definitionally increasing addiction, the argument that one side of the spectrum is strictly better is wrong.
I can see the argument here morally (and I agree with it), but in practice I know far more people negatively affected by drug addictions and drug addicts than I know people unable to get pain management medication they need. I imagine my experience may be typical, and so I am unsurprised the pendulum has swung so far.