The "roots" of opiate addiction are not just chronic physical pain, but the misery and hopelessness that follow from grinding poverty and the treadmill of ungainful work, existential despair, the meaninglessness and shallowness of contemporary culture, loneliness and alienation.

Not very likely that such problems can be eliminated, so let people have their opiates if they want them and reserve legal punishments--indeed, increase the severity of punishments--for those who make themselves a public nuisance