This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 19th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The opioid crisis in the United States has been exacerbated by a pandemic, of course,

but the attempts by lawmakers to stem problems

associated with opioids sends a clear signal to physicians to prescribe less pain

medication whether or not that serves their patients well. By putting

up hurdles to physicians engaging in the prescription of opioids, Cato's Jeff

Singer argues lawmakers insult both patients and their doctors.

Saker provides a few avenues for a form that would go some distance

toward allowing doctors and patients to work out how best to manage pain.

For people who have watched Dopesick, which is based on one telling of the opioid crisis

in the United States, I think you would agree that people have gotten sort of an unclear

and not exactly fair understanding of how we got to this pretty dire situation with respect to

opioid overdoses.

Yeah, it's, I've written about this a lot in fact.

The policy makers, many of whom are invested in the war on drugs

when they began to see overdose rates really rising in the early part of the century

and catching the attention of the general media they look for an easy scapegoat which

was doctors prescribing opioids to their patients in pain and supposedly

hooking them and that there have been a number of books including Dopesick, Dreamland that have

reinforced this notion.

And no doubt there are some doctors who've practiced

...