Narcotic abuse: Blame the pushers not the docs

there is a meme in medicine blaming docs for prescribing narcotics to people in pain. So now people will have to suffer because druggies lie, steal, etc narcotics.

LATimes about Oxycontin sales:

Purdue did not shut off the supply of highly addictive OxyContin and did not tell authorities what it knew about Lake Medical until several years later when the clinic was out of business and its leaders indicted. By that time, 1.1 million pills had spilled into the hands of Armenian mobsters, the Crips gang and other criminals. A Los Angeles Times investigation found that, for more than a decade, Purdue collected extensive evidence suggesting illegal trafficking of OxyContin and, in many cases, did not share it with law enforcement or cut off the flow of pills. A former Purdue executive, who monitored pharmacies for criminal activity, acknowledged that even when the company had evidence pharmacies were colluding with drug dealers, it did not stop supplying distributors selling to those stores.

When the small family dental supply company my father worked for was taken over by a big conglomerate, he lost his job as an executive, but was given a clerk job instead (they also refused a pension for my mom because he died a few months before his 65th birthday).

Well, anyway, he came home one day and said he saw an oder for thousands of amphetamine pills being sent to "clinics" in Tiajuana. Obviously these were being diverted to sell in the US. But since there was not yet a war on drugs, and since this was before Methamphetamine was made into a Class II prescription, he didn't report it. If he had, he would have lost his job, and he was too old for anyone else to hire.