Big difference between a dentist and a doctor who is dealing with chronic pain patients. I applaud your integrity and thoroughness.
The problem is most of the time the end users aren’t held accountable for their part in the addiction. At some point the user has to take responsibility.
One big issue is that the “system” has spent decades calling addiction a “disease”. Morons like Dr.Phil and that who part of the medical world love to call addiction a disease when it’s not. It’s a behavior.
If you classify addiction as a disease then there is no real personal responsibility for the addict, and of course you can never be cured because, well it’s a disease.
AA (and I suppose NA and all the other alphabet soup of different organizations that exist so the courts have somewhere to send these people in hope that something sticks even though the two big factors of personal responsibility and the acknowledgement that you don’t have a disease are working at cross purposes) have such a horrible record of recidivism that they should just be stopped.
I can say from personal experience that I’m sick of all the bellyaching about opioid use and abuse. I’m tired of being treated like a criminal when the addicts (who are breaking the law and thus…criminals) are coddled and catered to like royalty.
The last thing I want is the government or even a pharmacist controlling what my doctor and I agree is a proper course of treatment. It’s neither the government or the pharmacists problem to deal with.
Of course, because I have to make sure I’m understood I have no problem with a pharmacist making sure that there aren’t multiple doctors prescribing the same medications and all that. Outside of that, they need to fill what the doctor wrote and send it.
And as a last note, we now have pharmacies that make up their own rules regarding prescriptions and how/when they should be filled that are more restrictive than what the government says. That’s bullshit.
