JJ2020:
Statistics are irrelevant. To the person who is addicted, it is 100%.
Opioid are medications that are used for specific conditions. The common ones are pain and cough. It is widely recognized in the medical field that dependency is a problem, and there are supposed to be efforts made to avoid that. It is certainly an issue that someone that begins to use opiates legitimately has a risk of developing dependency. There are cases in which this unfortunate development is the lesser of the evils (or at least judged so), and the approach is to maintain the person on these drugs to avoid the alternatives. There are also medications available today that are used as maintenance drugs, that fill the body’s need for the “fix” while hopefully decreasing the other risks of overdose. Long shpiel, and outside the scope of this thread. But the other implication is that the prescribing physician that ignores the risk of addiction is plainly irresponsible.