Congress Needs an Opioid Intervention: New at Reason

In an effort to “combat the opioid crisis” in America, Congress is calling for a slate of governmental interventions that have been tried, tested, and shown to cause more harm. In June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed 50 bills, with more to come, that throw billions of dollars at already rich universities, hand responsibility for determining addiction treatment procedures to the federal government, and allow the U.S. attorney general to ban vaguely defined substances, among many other clumsy actions. Too much of the new legislation is grounded in the “overprescription” hypothesis, which blames the current unprecedented rates of overdose on an expansion in the number of opioid prescriptions that began in the 1990s. The consensus around this theory has prompted Congress to further restrict opioid prescription access, writes Jacob Rich.

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