Is It Mere Coincidence That America Invaded Afghanistan And The Opioid Epidemic Exploded

In 1999, pain management advocacy groups, in conjunction with the pharmaceutical industry successfully lobbied congress to have the laws changed in favor of allowing doctors to prescribe opioid drugs for common causes of pain. This law change allowed them to distribute opioid pain medications to their patients without being scrutinized by long-standing laws and accepted norms that restricted their usage to only the most severe of pain situations like cancer, for instance. Forty, fifty years ago, it was simply uncommon for a doctor to use drugs derived from opium to treat routine pain situations, mostly because it was illegal to do so. 1999 changed all that.

Now, nearly twenty years later the entire country is running around with their hair on fire and screaming, "opioid epidemic, opioid epidemic"! Loosely the term "opioid epidemic" was first coined about a decade ago when everything got to tragic proportions and emergency rooms were inundated with people overdosing from these dangerous drugs. The bad news with this situation is that they're still prescribing this garbage in record numbers. Why? Are there no other pain management drugs available to doctors?

I've had my own brush with opioids lately due to a gall bladder removal surgery and being given morphene and oxycodone, both drugs derived from opium. Luckily, my experience was either brief, or light enough that I've been able to detox them from my body and move on to more reasonable form s of managing pain, which has passed. While researching this whole disgusting situation, I was reading a very good article published by Optum and noticed something that never occurred to me when gazing at one of their charts.

Opioid overdoses definitively spiked early on in the 21st century and then exploded year after year thereafter. It occurred to me that this whole epidemic seemed to gain traction at the very time that the United States invaded Afghanistan, which happened October 7, 2001. I suppose there's very little argument to the contrary, but Afghanistan is pretty much the opium capital of the damn planet. Other countries and regions cultivate it, but the Afghans are major players in this drug that has plagued the world for centuries.

I suppose my curiosity is fairly straightforward here: we invaded Afghanistan and opium based drugs were immediately on the rise in the country doing the invading. Tell me why I'm off base here if you feel so inclined.