Oh one other note the overdoses from those who are taking too much, or are abusing, are dying from the high levels of acetiminophen, not from the opiod itself. In addition pain patients who are "undertreated" for their pain start taking advil, and tylenol in addition to what they have been prescribed and end up with kidney, liver issues big time. If they are properly treated for their pain, and not undertreated by a skiddish doctor worried about the DEA coming to wreak havoc on their practice, you might not see so many in the ER from these issues. Again, it is education that is needed, and there are far too many doctors who only get 2-3 days tops in training in medical school on the use of pain medications. Don't believe me? Start researching it online and find out how little they are actually trained on this. Nor are they given real training on chronic pain patients, and how best to treat them.
When you take away inexpensive affective opiod pain medication and then start prescribing in-affective expensive medications (where the cost may or may not be covered by medicare or regular health insurance) , that is a huge problem too. So now a person gets put on Celebrex to treat pain and is paying 100 dollars out of pocket cost as compared to 3$ for a 30 day supply of vicodin, or codeine that works far better.
Even worse is, at least in my area, I know quite a few people who have chronic pain issues and their doctors are putting them on SSRI's like Cymbalta. They say it helps a little bit but nowhere near worth the money. To top it off, the withdrawals from the non-narcotic Cymbalta are FAR worse than the opiods.
That and all the higher end opiod addicts will switch to heroin when they can no longer fuel their addiction through pharmaceuticals. Boy does that ever sound like a great fucking idea, more heroin junkies. And to sweeten the pot even more a bunch of them will be clogging up the ER since they are switching from a pharmaceutical, in which they can very easily get the dosage right, to a drug most of them will be relatively new too and its strength can vary from one day to the next.