The share of opioid pills paid for by the government went from 17% to 60% through the initial phase of the epidemic, from 2001 to 2010, when prescriptions dominated misuse.
There are many bad actors in the opioid crisis and the government is right to go after them. But your editorial “Scapegoating Walmart” (Dec. 30) is correct: Walmart’s pharmacies are not among them. Our government is scapegoating and suing the private sector, when the most important driver of the crisis was the federal government’s indiscriminate financing of the underlying opioid prescriptions. Government subsidies for pain management and other medical uses of opioids may be valuable, but people are dying from nonmedical uses that shouldn’t be publicly financed.
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