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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Over the last two years or so, opioid production in yeast [wired.com] has moved from hypothetical [wired.com] to experimental success [wired.com]. It could take years before industrial quantities of opioids are produced from yeast but re-assurances have been made that home-brew heroin won't [soylentnews.org] become commonplace [soylentnews.org]. With or without yeast opiates, fentanyl and [soylentnews.org] carfentanyl are causing an increasing number of deaths [soylentnews.org] and these occur disproportionately among rural, white, formerly middle-class men. In the US, supermarkets and pharmacies increasingly sell opioid antagonists like cough medicine [soylentnews.org] but this has little effect on the 46 people per day dying from prescription painkiller overdoses [thefix.com]. Purdue Pharma paid a massive US$635 million for fraudulent mis-representation of opioid addiction. However, that's against revenue of US$31 billion, so this 5% cost of doing business has not prevented the controlling Sackler family from becoming the 16th richest in the US [soylentnews.org]. (Source [latimes.com].)

In addition to repeatedly being discussed by members of SoylentNews, opioid addiction was the topic of HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in Oct 2016 [youtube.com] and in Mar 2017, in a break from the usual format, the second half of Keiser Report episode 1049: Trail of American Carnage names and shames the Sackler family [youtube.com]. (More episode details here [maxkeiser.com] and here [rt.com].) Although John Oliver makes some tasteless jokes about opioid overdoses, it is otherwise a concise primer about the situation. In particular, he finishes by noting that people with chronic or terminal illness expect continued prescriptions of opioid painkillers and therefore an outright ban is problematic.

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