Stop paying people for not working and the use of Opioids will automatically come down

 If we had a time machine   we can get some  information  from  China  and  England which can throw  some light on  USA's  Opioid epidemic.

 Although there are  people who have  alternate "FACTS" Like Fox news ( Julia Lovell Opium wars)

THE OPIUM WAR AND THE END OF CHINA'S LAST GOLDEN AGE STEPHEN R. PLATT

The study authors were also surprised by the tremendous differences between states in opioid use. “There was a fivefold difference between the highest state, Rhode Island, and the lowest state, North Dakota,” Dr. Piper said. “Pain is a biopsychosocial condition, but there is no reason to believe that the citizens of Rhode Island are biologically different than those from North Dakota. Hence, there is much left to learn about the sociocultural and economic factors that are responsible for the substantial opioid prescribing differences across states.”

“Not being able to report methadone is a barrier for pharmacoepidemiological research, adversely impacts evidence-based medicine, and, most crucial, is an impediment to informed decision making and communication for the health providers of the 345,000 methadone patients in the U.S.,” Dr. Piper said.

The authors advocate three strategies that should be considered to curb opioid use: thoroughly vetting potential policymakers who make decisions about opioids at a state or national level for their conflicts of interest; the ability to report methadone from narcotic treatment programs in PDMPs; and eliminating direct-to-consumer marketing for controlled substances.

"If you stand outside the wall, it is impossible to gauge the size of the city. Canton is built on a plain, so the low, flat buildings of brick and wood that lie inside are invisible from where you stand. The wall is thirty feet high and crenellated, built from large blocks of sandstone at its base and smaller bricks above. It stretches as far as you can see in either direction, with forts visible on top at regular intervals, cannons peering outward. Near you is one of the twelve massive wooden gates that open into the city, a shadowed cave guarded by soldiers and horsemen. The gates creak open each morning at dawn, and close again each evening around 9 p.m. Not that you will be allowed in. As a foreigner, you are stopped at the gate and turned away. You Mill not see the fantastic warren of narrow streets inside, paved with thick slabs of granite. You will not see the dense brick houses with their sloping tiled roofs, the vast examination hall with its thousands of cells, the lavish mansions, the temples, the gardens, or the government offices that lie within. Instead, you stay outside and wander back through the suburbs, the sprawling and amorphous settlements surrounding the wall where you could walk for miles without any sense of their coming to an end. It is steamy weather, so humid your sweat seems to just blend into the air around you. The paved streets are twisting and so very narrow that you can sometimes touch the walls on both sides at the same time. The buildings here, fronted with fragrant carved wood, are mostly two stories high, with tall shutters on the windows. Above you, laundry hangs to dry on lines stretched across the top of the alley, creating a canopy effect. It is hard to hear over the din of the hawkers and the shouting of porters and chair-bearers as they try to push their way through. Everywhere is the press of humanity—people traveling on foot or carried in sedan chairs, lounging in the alleyways, eating in open-air restaurants as street performers and beggars"

Just like  New York of today.

The Chinese of the early nineteenth century are often described as being uniformly insular and scornful of anything foreign, thanks mainly to an overly literal reading of the boilerplate language in Qianlong's edict to George Ill where he claimed that he did not value foreign things. But this was not really the case. For wealthy urbanites in China, Western goods were all the rage by the 1820s—furs, glass, intricate clocks, cotton textiles, and other products of the Canton import trade, which were highly sought after by those with sufficient money to buy them. Far from encountering any kind of disdain for foreign objects, Chinese retailers in the early nineteenth century found that attaching the adjective "Western" to their merchandise was in fact the key to a higher selling price.

This consumer fashion for foreign products helps explain why the opium from British India became so popular in China. Against latter-day nationalist claims that the British came and forced opium down the throats of helpless Chinese consumers, there was in fact an existing system of domestic opium production in China already in place to compete with the import market at Canton (especially in the empire's western and southwestern provinces). There were also separate avenues for importing the drug overland from Central Asia—and opium from all of those sources was much cheaper than the Indian opium the British brought to Canton.23 But opium was a luxury good, and its wealthy consumers weren't looking for a bargain; they were looking for status. "

like Walmart and  Crack users of  New york & cocaine and  Sacks fifth avenue , Versace clients of LA

For all the protestations of Palmerston and his supporters that the war was not meant to support the opium trade, it certainly proved a great boon for that commerce. In the years that followed the war, opium exports from India, mostly destined for China, surpassed their previous highs and went on to reach new ones—forty thousand chests per year by 1846, fifty thousand by 1849, more than seventy thousand by 1855.57 As the opium trade regained steam thanks to the war, even the Americans of Russell & Co.—proving themselves more pragmatic than an ri ht back in a ain. The East India

three times over by 1848 to dramatically increase its income from the free growth and production of opium by independent farmers who were not British subjects.58 British India's financial dependence on opium grew accordingly. Whereas opium revenues had made up less than a tenth of the Bengal government's income at the time of the Opium War, by the 1850s the share had risen to  nearly one-sixth.59 Within China, opium was still technically a clandestine trade after the war (if more omnipresent than ever), but by the mid-1850s, faced with a gigantic rebellion by the quasi- Christian peasant forces of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom —an insurrection to make the White Intus look like a tempest in a teapot—some provincial officials resuscitated the dormant issue of legalization, proposing domestic

the dormant issue of legalization, proposing domestic taxes on opium to help fund the war effort.60 And though George Staunton continued with his ineffectual efforts to force an end to Britain's involvement in opium after the war, by 1856 he conceded that such efforts were no longer necessary because the trade was by that time effectively legal in China.61 That de facto legality would be made concrete in 1858 on the heels of another war, With Britain and France, after which the British plenipotentiary Lord Elgin would, much to his own mortification, sign a document setting a formal tariff for the import of opium into China. But already by that time, the only limit to the growth of the drug's use in the Qing Empire was its price,

a very interesting  exchange of words from the movie Traffic 

Robert Wakefield: [1:58:53] I can't believe you brought my daughter to this place.

Seth Abrahams: Woah. Why don't you just back the fuck up, man. "To this place"? What is that shit? Ok, right now, all over this great nation of ours, 'hundred thousand white people from the suburbs are cruisin' around downtown asking every black person they see "You got any drugs? You know where I can score some drugs?" *Think* about the effect that that has on the psyche of a black person, on their possibilities. I... God I guarantee you bring a hundred thousand black people into your neighborhood, into fuckin' Indian Hills, and they're asking every white person they see "You got any drugs? You know where I can score some drugs?", within a *day* everyone would be selling. Your friends. Their kids. Here's why: it's an unbeatable market force man. It's a three-hundred percent markup value. You can go out on the street and make five-hundred dollars in two hours, come back and do whatever you want to do with the rest of your day and, I'm sorry, you're telling me that... you're telling me that white people would still be going to law school?

The symbolic power of the Opium War is almost limitless. It has long stood as the point when China's weakness was laid bare before the world, the opening of a "Century of Humiliation" in which Western (and later Japanese) predators would make war on China to bully it into granting territorial concessions and trading rights. It marked a sea change in relations with the West—the end of one era, when foreigners came to China as supplicants, and the dawn of another, when they would come as conquerors. And it carries especially strong power because China unquestionably had the moral high ground: as remembered since, and as charged by critics at the time, Great Britain unleashed its navy on a nearly defenseless China in order to advance the interests of its national drug dealers, who for years had been smuggling opium to China's coast against the laws of the country. The shocking grounds of the war have provided the very foundation of modern Chinese nationalism—from the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the rise, first of the Republic, and then the People's Republic of China, the Opium War has stood for the essence of everything modern China has tried  to leave behind: weakness, victimhood, shame. Because we live in a world so heavily shadowed by this