Okay so you're really telling me that the inner city addict who steals his brother's watch and pawns it for drug money, back in 1992, that was all because he used to be functioning member of society but then got a prescription? Come on man. Heroin has been around a lot longer than any sort of Perdue malfeasance, as have the criminals supplying it to junkies.

I will perhaps give you that it's possible a large number of new heroin users started with prescription pills, for some period during the height of the crisis. But it is beyond ridiculous to ascribe every opioid death to Purdue.

And as for combining drugs, yes that is the risk you take when you buy illicit substances off the street. That is a thing that has been going on long before Purdue, continues today, and will continue into the future even after they rebrand or reorganize or whatever they call it. None of that has anything to do with Purdue.

My point is, the US of course has a drug problem and lots of people die from it. But if you are going to talk about the harm a company creates, you should focus on the deaths actually related to that harm, not out of a broad general category.

For example, if you say 'People need to slow down in work zones! 500 highway workers died on the job last year!' But if the reality is only 100 of those died from being hit by vehicles, the other 400 died from equipment malfunction, chemical exposure, and bad workplace safety practices, your statistic is irrelevant and disingenuous, just like this article.

I don't think I've ever read a more heartless and unempathetic reply in my whole life.

Your post, and the linked article, boiled down, basically all say that doctors should ignore pain and patients who are in pain should just suck it up and not think about it.

I'm very glad that medical science doesn't treat patients in such a cold and uncaring manner. By this logic, there's no reason to bother with anesthetic during or after surgery, because 'pain is part of life'. There's no reason to do joint replacements, because 'pain is part of life' and if the person can't walk more than 10' without pain too fucking bad for them.

Perhaps someday there will be an objective way to measure pain- some scanner that can read the signals going up the spinal cord or can read activations of nerve endings. But until then, this is what we've got.

I encourage you to take a serious look in the mirror and think about what kind of person you want to be. Because right now you're someone that looks at a fellow human who is suffering and says 'too bad, we shouldn't lift a finger to help them'.