The Opioid Reckoning Will Not Be Just

A hospital is a menagerie of dangerous products. The magnets in an MRI scanner could hurl an IV pole across the room and impale a person. A defibrillator can restart your heart, but the same electric shock could stop it. The operating room is a repository of scalpels and saws and drills made specifically to penetrate and shred human organs.

Opiate medications likewise serve as powerful tools to relieve suffering, and can very easily cause it. The drugs are analogues of heroin, the potent opiate that has long been almost universally synonymous with danger—with arrests, needles, rock bottom, death. But heroin has killed far fewer people than legal opioid pills in the past two decades. Of the more than 250,000 deaths in the United States from opioid-related overdoses, a minority involved heroin.