Clearly there are situations when they are necessary. There needs to be real common sense in prescribing these drugs to the people who legitimately need them and keeping them away from people who need their daily fix.
The issue is with the pill mills and "doctors" who abuse their privilege to prescribe medications. I know too many young people who started out with a sports injury and ended up with heroin addiction and death. It's devastating to the families.
Opiates overly prescribed is a major problem for sure.
Here's a bit of data copied from this site: .gov/about-nida/legislative-activities/testimony-to-congress/2017/federal-efforts-to-combat-opioid-crisis-status-update-cara-other-initiatives
Mr. Neil Doherty, Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of Diversion Control, Drug Enforcement Administration
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz, Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
Dr. Anne Schuchat, Principal Deputy Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Dr. Nora Volkow, Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Over the past 15 years, communities across our Nation have been devastated by increasing prescription and illicit opioid abuse, addiction, and overdose. According the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH),
in 2016, over 11 million Americans misused prescription opioids, nearly 1 million used heroin, and 2.1 million had an opioid use disorder due to prescription opioids or heroin. Over the past decade, the U.S. has experienced significant increases in rates of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), hepatitis C infections, and opioid-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations. Most alarming are the continued increases in overdose deaths, especially the rapid increase since 2013 in deaths involving illicitly made fentanyl and other highly potent synthetic opioids. Since 2000, more than 300,000 Americans have died of an opioid overdose. Preliminary data for 2016 indicate at least 64,000 drug overdose deaths, the highest number ever recorded in the U.S. Too many of our citizens are being robbed of their God-given potential in the prime of their life.
The opioid epidemic in the U.S. is fundamentally tied to two primary issues. The first issue was the significant rise in opioid analgesic prescriptions that began in the mid-to-late 1990s. Not only did the volume of opioids prescribed increase, but well-intentioned healthcare providers began to prescribe opioids to treat pain in ways that we now know are high-risk and have been associated with opioid abuse, addiction, and overdose, such as prescribing at high doses and for longer durations. The second issue is a lack of health system and healthcare provider capacity to identify and engage individuals, and provide them with high-quality, evidence-based opioid addiction treatment, in particular the full spectrum of medication-assisted treatment (MAT). It is well-documented that the majority of people with opioid addiction in the U.S. do not receive treatment, and even among those who do, many do not receive evidence-based care. Accounting for these factors is paramount to the development of a successful strategy to combat the opioid crisis. Further, there is a need for more rigorous research to better understand how existing programs or policies might be contributing to or mitigating the opioid epidemic.
Every notice how in the States when you're paying with debit the machine doesn't give you a choice which account you want the payment to come out of? We've got 2 accounts linked to our card and are used to using each of them for separate things. In the States I'm not even sure which account they're drawing from until I check my accounts. 
