The “opioid epidemic” panic is already greatly harming patients. Doctors are afraid to prescribe any medications with addiction potential, even when they know that the patients need them. I know people who are having to make multiple visits to the same doctor to get the same meds they got before with one visit a year — and those visits cost money. Since most people with severe pain are elderly, those visits cost the taxpayer money. And, for someone in pain, driving to a doctor’s office and sitting around a waiting room can be excruciating.

This article only serves one purpose: make the lawyers rich. But in the process, it helps distract from the very real problem of people in pain, often cancer patients, who are dying because they are denied the medications they need. Some commit suicide, others buy them on the street and die because the dosages are unpredictable, especially with the large influx of Chinese made fentanyl and its more potent cousin carfentanyl.

Yes, some people abuse prescription drugs. And yes, sometime innocent people become addicted.

But bankrupting the companies that provide the drugs that provide pain relief is not the way to deal with the problem.