They do indeed. However, I have been following the completely unproductive, tortuous, and deadly throttling of pain patients (~20 Million chronic, some intractable) that the CDC lit on fire in 2016. There is essentially zero correlation between prescriptions for pharmaceutical Opioids in any state in the US at any time in the last few years and fatalities (alleged, via very low reliability forensics) to be associated with Opioids [almost entirely illicit Fentany(s)]. Prohibitions and persecutions of prescribing physicians as well as patients have and continue to wreak tragic consequences, while the illicit markets opportunistically became flooded and virtually dominated by super-dangerous and deadly Fentanyl(s). Despite being assailed by many detractors revealing CDC’s horrifically non-scientific and unethical actions/inactions, the very same BS is proceeding today without end. The CDC are experts at agitprop induced fear and panic allowing the “manufacture of popular consent” via “shock doctrines” - and the dark expertise in deceptions that they have honed in the persecution of Pain Management medicine has, and is now, being turned full on upon Nicotine. (Believe it or not), we own our own bodies and minds, and the chemical-statist regime (that many seem to naively plead for) is forging fatal fetters of not only avoidable, but deeply immoral, harms upon our society and it’s public health. Moral Crusades wearing Medical Masks are an imposition upon, and a grave insult to, a free society.
Meanwhile - while we writhe in the tragedy of our own Rabidly Moronic Nanny State Circular Firing Squads, the social “problems” that it is fashionable in the US to attempt to ascribe to the medical distribution of pharmaceutical Opioid medications for pain are vastly less of a problem or danger to public health in more progressive countries. We are in the US are cruelly causing people to suffer and to die without justification.
(June 24, 2019): “One Possible Solution to the Opioid Crisis in the U.S. Has Been Inexplicably Ignored”
(June 6, 2019): “European Drug Report 2019 directly contrasts US drug crisis, tells a story of relative calm”
(April 17, 2019): “One Doctor’s Answer to Drug Deaths: Opioid Vending Machines”
(December 5, 2017): “Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?”
(October 12, 2017): “The Lancet Commissions: Alleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain relief - an imperative of universal health coverage”
Regardless of widespread BS agitprop, there to date do not exist viable (much less covered by insurance) alternative therapies than can meaningfully address intense, severe, and intractable pain in human beings. The so-called “magic bullet” of powerful substitute analgesics that don’t interact with Mu Opioid Receptors have been promised “Unicorns” for as long as we have been alive - and are yet to exist. Opioid therapy is demonstrably less physiologically harmful and dangerous as are high-dose Acetaminophen and NSAIDs, and vastly less harmful and dangerous than is Ethanol (Alcohol). Public policies should be based upon physiological harm - and not upon only allegedly morally justified incursions upon the autonomy/agency of competent adults. People must reclaim ownership of their bodies/minds from power hungry control freaks. Those who wish for others to direct and determine their decisions and quality of life may be disappointed.
The paradigm of religious authority under priests has been replaced by the paradigm of quasi-religious authority of doctors over patients. Instead of dazzling peasants with Latin phrases and convoluted creeds as did the priests of yore, doctors now dazzle their patients with abstruse medical terminology and jargon. The result is that very few people have thought to question the authority of the new state-sponsored religion of medicine.
“Medication Assisted Therapy” (MAT), namely the population of Mu Opioid Receptors with long plasma half-life “mixed Agonist/Antagonist” molecules Buprenorphine (Suboxone), Methadone, and more problematically to initiate (and in some cases), Naltrexone, are vastly more effective than “12-step” type “psychotherapies” (which have no more than an ~10% success rate where it comes to Opioid users), and (assuming that these expensive to purchase drugs are not rapidly withdrawn, just like any Opioid), can indeed be helpful. The main problem is that none of them are particularly efficacious analgesics, and duration of analgesia is only a few hours time. Some find that Methadone can help somewhat with pain relief, but Buprenorphine is considered less effective, and Naltrexone does not even get a mention on that score. Problems arise in the event of severe “acute” pain - and how then to effectively, while also safely, administer adequate analgesia.
Analgesic Properties of Maintenance Opioids:
Patients receiving maintenance therapy with opioids for addiction treatment do not derive sustained analgesia from it. Methadone and buprenorphine, potent analgesics, have a duration of action for analgesia (4 to 8 hours) that is substantially shorter than their suppression of opioid withdrawal (24 to 48 hours). Because most patients receiving OAT are given a dose every 24 to 48 hours, the period of even partial pain relief with these medications is small."
(2006): Acute Pain Management for Patients Receiving Maintenance Methadone or Buprenorphine Therapy - PMC
Another reality to recognize is that (in US) only ~1 in 8 persons seeking “MAT” are able to obtain and use it. They have similar physical side-effects as other Opioids, and must be tapered and withdrawn very slowly. It seems little wonder that in this gov-manufactured “mortality crisis”, human beings have/are dying in droves.
We can only “hope and pray” that the prohibition and throttling of Nicotine will not take such grave and tragic turns. There are few if any ways to preventively discover and protect from such chemical contaminations - and our (merely professed) “friends” at the CDC/FDA would (nefariously) love nothing more to occur. 
The vast collateral damages of deranged, incompetent lunacies. Entire industries destroyed in the interest of “milking the holy MSA cow”.
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