Don't Blame Pain Pills For The Opioid Crisis

CHRIS CHRISTIE, THE outgoing governor of New Jersey, has repeatedly told the story of a law school classmate who died of an overdose after getting hooked onoxycodone prescribed for back pain.

- Jacob Sullum

A recently released final report from the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, which Christie chaired, wrongly implies that such cases are typical.

“A widely held and supportable view is that the modern opioid crisis originated within the healthcare system,” the report says; the problem began with “a growing compulsion to detect and treat pain.”

According to this narrative, doctors in the late 1990s began to underestimate the risk of addiction and overdose among patients prescribed narcotics for pain. Responding to advocacy on behalf of pain patients and deceptive marketing by drug companies, they supposedly began prescribing opioids left and right, leading to a surge in “iatrogenic addiction” ( addiction caused by treatment) and overdose deaths.

To correct that disastrous mistake, the Christie commission says, doctors need to worry less about the suffering caused by untreated pain and more about the dangers posed by painkillers. But that conclusion is fundamentally misguided, because the commission’s explanation is wrong in several crucial ways.