[0x00_NULL]

We sure did. About 60-70% of all of the world's opium was sourced from Afghanistan until 2022. That supply was used to make actual prescriptions in non-OECD countries - like India & China - as well as sold to make heroin in the US, EU, Asia, and Africa.

But be careful about confusing cause & effect. The cause of the Afghani farmers growing opium was the insatiable demand for opium that was developed through legal means. Then, when countries like the US started to restrict access to opiates, addicts and patients alike started to seek alternatives to the scarce prescriptions.

More to the point, why didn't patients use something else? Because there is nothing. Purdue's misinformation actively discouraged the discovery of new non-addictive compounds for decades. No one was looking, and the R&D pipeline ran dry.

By the time enough doctors sounded enough alarms to cause a change in the late 2010s, research in non-addictive pain management solutions was decades behind. No one engaged in it because there was no need for it. Now that we realize it was all a lie and these drugs have killed millions, there are no alternatives. Very few potential compounds are even in Phase 2 clinical trials right now, let alone the half dozen that would be needed in Phase 3 to ensure we have a single alternate choice for pain management in the next five years.

So, the outlook looks bleak. Today, in 2024, we don't have good ways to manage pain that is non-addictive, and certainly no good way to reach the millions who are hopelessly addicted to opioids for pain management. But, very little of this is the patient's fault - and a lot of this is directly related to the monumental efforts of Purdue to misinform for profit.