re: To what extent is society morally obligated to save heroin addicts?

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I found the problem. Nobody thought opiates weren't addictive.

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Nobody? Really? When so many otherwise decent docs were handing them out like candy (and so many otherwise reasonable adults were taking them), it's hard for me to imagine that there weren't plenty who legitimately fell for the party line. To be fair, I can also believe that plenty didn't, and didn't have a whole lot of recourse because of the way the system was structured.

Look, I hate the mentality of wanting a magic pill to fix everything. Even before the opioid crisis was a thing, I didn't believe that heavy pain meds were anything to frick around with. In the last few years alone I've had a surgery, cracked ribs, and shingles and never took anything stronger than Advil because I could get by with it, and it was safer. So yeah, manufacturer negligence is never solely to blame. Just because a doctor prescribes something doesn't mean you have to take it, or that there might not be a better/safer way to get an acceptable result.

Still, without their blatantly misrepresented product most of this discussion is academic. You'd still have a broken, shitty system full of patients with shitty attitudes, sure, but I don't think you'd have nearly the number of former housewives and construction workers out on the streets trying to score their next hit of black tar. There's plenty of blame to go around, but it seems absurd to say more of it rests on the patient or the insurance companies or the government than on the corporations who put a dangerous product on the market because they didn't bother to verify if their own selling points made any damn sense.