I love how you managed you blame the opiate crisis on pharma companies, when it's directly tired to the consequences of drug prohibition by governments.
I don't like prohibition and the recreational drug market is ripe for reform. There are better and worse ways to do that -- see Mark Kleiman's writings for strategies to construct legal marijuana markets where the incentives for companies to manufacture addicts are minimized.
But the opiate crisis is not an example of supply inadequacy due to prohibition. The pharmaceutical industry has artificially increased demand.
If you believe that we should be skeptical of both, perhaps there's common ground where we can agree. Power corrupts, power collects within both government and industry, and they constantly reinforce each other through corruption and regulatory capture. The state has the monopoly on violence so it deserves special care, but commercial entities (especially multi-national corporations) have plenty of power to threaten and ruin individuals.
Is the opiate crisis really tied to drug prohibition? I'm sympathetic to the idea of reducig restrictions on dru use, but drugs are prohibited all over the world, and yet it is the US where opiate painkillers are overproscribed that has a big opiates afdiction problem...
