This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 31st, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Deaths from opioids are way up in the United States, but the standard narrative of opioid addiction and overdose would demand

crackdowns on physicians who prescribe opioids.

New data indicates that much of the standard narrative is simply wrong, and pain patients are paying the price.

In Dallas this month I spoke with Cato Senior Fellow Jeff Singer about what

must be true for this standard narrative on opioid addiction to be correct.

The standard narrative about the causes of the opioid overdose crisis

has been for the last several years that basically incompetent or unprepared doctors were

manipulated by greedy pharmaceutical manufacturers into overprescribing prescription opioids

to naive innocent patients who then became hooked on them and were condemned to a life of addiction.

And that the pharmaceutical companies sold the doctors on the belief that prescription opioids have a very low overdose

potential and a very low addictive potential, when in fact these people say it actually has a high

overdose potential and a high addictive potential.

So all these people right now who are dying from opioid-related deaths primarily derive from people who are overly prescribed,

more too liberally prescribed prescription opioids.

So in order for the standard narrative to be true, we would expect there to be a reasonably high addiction rate for people who have been prescribed opioids in recent years as compared with in the in the 90s

or the 2000s in the 90s and 80s. Yes and numerous studies not just studies done back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but some very big, very high quality recent studies show that not to be the case.

For example, in 2010 and 2012, two Cochran systematic reviews were reported.

For those who don't know, Cochran reviews are considered among the most rigorous, highly respected types of studies done in the medical field.

And they found on chronic non-cancer pain patients on opioids chronically, a roughly 1% addiction rate.

A recent study published in the beginning of 2018 from researchers at Harvard and Johns Hopkins looked at 568,000 acute post-surgical

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