This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, July 8th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court has made it perhaps a bit harder for law enforcement to target doctors

they believe are prescribing pain medication

inappropriately. And still that hasn't stopped some states from moving ahead with

plans to crack down even further. Cato's Jeff Singer explains why proper pain

management is something law enforcement knows basically nothing about.

The overdose crisis, as you put it, has been exacerbated by a pandemic.

Governments from the Justice Department. exacerbated by a pandemic.

Governments from the Justice Department to State Attorneys General have tried to,

as best they can, pin this, for lack of a better phrase on pharmaceutical companies and physicians.

And as you've long said this is probably not the best way to look at it.

That's correct. In fact, as I pointed out over and over again,

there's evidence that, strong evidence that the overdose crisis has actually been on an exponential growth trend at least since the late 70s.

A congressional report recently said,

actually overdoses started up in the late 50s.

And I've always argued that it's primarily due

to a growing number of people who are non-medical using drugs intersecting with the fact that we have drug prohibition

which makes these drugs more dangerous.

And so it's a bad combination where you have people

of course obtaining drugs that you don't know the dose, you don't know what's in it,

you don't even know what they say they are, and there's a whole lot of people dying.

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