It is a good thing, JLM. Putting people in jail for smoking a joint was stupid, costly and unnecessary from the get go. The police can now concentrate their stretched resources on the opioid problem - something that is a much bigger threat than pot ever was or ever will be considering the ever increasing rate of deaths from the former.
Yes some doctors need to be in jail as do the regulatory agencies that allowed this profitable epidemic to be created.
CDC Ignored Warning About Opioid Guidelines
A consulting company hired by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the agency last year that many doctors had stopped prescribing opioid pain medication and that chronic pain patients felt “slighted and shamed” by the CDC’s opioid guidelines.
“Some doctors are following these guidelines as strict law rather than recommendation, and these physicians have completely stopped prescribing opioids,” PRR warned in a report to CDC in August 2016, five months after the CDC released its guidelines.
“Pain patients who have relied on these drugs for years are now left with little to no pain management options. Chronic pain is already stigmatized. Now chronic pain patients face the stigma of addiction, even when they are using opioids responsibly for pain management.”
https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2017/9/5/cdc-ignored-warnings-about-opioid-guidelines
Prescription opioids fail rigorous new test for chronic pain
https://www.statnews.com/2018/03/06/prescription-opioids-chronic-pain/
The CDC Opioid Guidelines Violate Standards Of Science Research
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/03/25/cdc-opioid-guidelines-violate-standards-science-research-11050
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has had historical credibility with the medical community, generally making judicious use of evidence for public health benefit. That is why it is disconcerting to read its recommendations [1] on opioids for chronic pain and accompanying descriptions in the media. With these new recommendations concerning the use of opioids, the CDC has taken available data and developed a narrative that H.L. Mencken would generally have described as “neat, plausible, and wrong.” [2]
The narrative is as follows: People in chronic, severe pain are readily provided unproven opioids in ever-increasing doses, get easily addicted and die of overdose either from the opioids prescribed to them or from a switch to lethal heroin.
Neat? Yes. Plausible? Yes. Wrong? Unfortunately, yes.
Patients with chronic, severe pain in 2016 have often tried available first-line options of physical therapy, behavioral treatment, NSAIDs, acetaminophen, anticonvulsants, tricyclic antidepressants, etc. prior to beginning an opioid medication. Indeed, the general outcome for many patients in pain is ever-increasing hardship in finding skilled prescribers who are willing to provide such treatment. [3–6]
https://medium.com/@stmartin/neat-p...endations-for-chronic-opioid-use-5c9d9d319f71
...and yet, on the other hand... pills are as good as money on the streets around here, and many old folks supplement their income by getting these prescriptions and the selling the pills to dealers, who supplement their income by selling to addicts who can't keep their spiralling DOCTOR initiated PILL addictions under control.
Initially the guidelines were based on Hospital staff controlled opiate use, NOT patient controlled opiate use, which is pretty much guaranteed to accelerate out of hand. THAT is what cause the billion dollar opiate epidemic.
Pharmaceutical Founder Arrested In Alleged Nationwide Opioid Scheme
On the same day President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency, the co-founder of a prominent opioid medication manufacturer has been arrested on fraud and racketeering charges. John Kapoor, former CEO of Insys Therapeutics, has been charged with conspiring to push the company's signature drug for unacceptable uses through a series of bribes and kickbacks.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo...-arrested-in-alleged-nationwide-opioid-scheme