I confess, I am a bit uneasy about the current batch of lawsuits against big pharma for its role in our self-proclaimed “opiod crisis.” It’s not that I have any affection for big pharma, quite the opposite. Nor am I am addict, though you can’t swing a dead cat at my family gatherings without hitting one – and several if the cat’s tail falls off. I did, however, spend a decade working in healthcare, the vast majority of it in inpatient behavioral health settings. I have assisted in more than my share of medical detoxification of patients who were addicted to various chemicals. I have led talk therapy groups that included addicted people, and the biggest lesson I learned from those folks is that recovery begins when the addict takes responsibility for their actions.

To be clear, I believe that addiction is a disease. I also believe that as long as an addict can blame someone else for their problems they aren’t at all likely to recover. What I see all of these legal actions saying is that big pharma made people addicts. To that I say, “nonsense.” Big pharma didn’t push those pills down anyone’s throat. They may have underplayed the addictive potential of these medications and that may have resulted in physicians over prescribing them when they first came out, but it has been a very long time indeed – decades – since anyone, especially physicians, believed that opiods weren’t highly addictive.

I am concerned that as settlements and legal judgments roll in against big pharma we will send the message that big pharma is responsible for your opiod addiction. We will also send the message that your physician wasn’t complicit in the problem in that they prescribed opiods far too easily. We may very well offer addicts another excuse to avoid recovery, something no amount of money can justify