Emerson, your post aligns with the main narrative pushed by the media, so I understand why you'd believe it, but the reporting on the issue has been abysmal.
This statement is a bit hard to parse. First, cancer is not the only condition that can put people in terrible pain. Far from it. Secondly, opioids absolutely do work for the pain of those conditions, and they can be taken safely, and the vast majority do.
Opioid prescriptions are not the main problem, in fact they only a very small part, only about 4.5%. The vast majority of opioid related deaths are the result of either people mixing opioids with other drugs, which you can't do safely in a lot of cases, or as a result of using illegal street versions which contain fentanyl which is a hundred times stronger than other opioids and 50 times stronger than heroin, or even carfentanyl which if I recall correctly is ten times stronger than that. Since the illegal versions aren't measured as strictly as the prescription ones, they're dangerous and easy to overdose on.
http://reason.com/archives/2016/05/18/opioid-epidemic-myths
Opioid prescriptions are not actually dangerous to take long-term:
The vast majority taking opioid prescriptions are not abusing them:
The drug companies absolutely should not have tried to act like they had no risk of addiction at all, but now we're swinging back in the opposite direction and overreacting. They are not always addicting.
It's not as real as it seems because of incorrect methodology. I suggest you read the criticism section on wikipedia about opioid-induced hyperalgesia. With proper methodology, it's not really a problem at all.
Even opioid tolerance isn't as much of a problem as people fear because you can simply rotate them.
I personally have a family member who's been taking prescription opioids safely for years for a condition with no cure. She didn't get addicted. Doesn't even get high. Opioids absolutely can work, and safely, but because of the hysteria the media is whipping up about them, important details which reveal the real sources of the problem are ignored.
We're basically freaking out about a slowly dripping pipe (the small number of problem doctors) when there's a gushing pipe on the other side of the room (street drugs, lack of knowledge about the stuff you can't mix them with and the reasons why people are turning to drugs in the first place, like hopelessness).
The terrible reporting is causing people to overreact and recently caused an across-the-board reduction of pain meds. My family member only gets a fifth of what she got before for no good reason at all, as they already put patients through regular checks to make sure they aren't abusing them. It's like they decided to reduce the speed limit to 10 mph everywhere because some people decide to speed and cause crashes. They're also not as easy to get as people think from almost all doctors, as they're generally paranoid about prescribing them and some pharmacies won't even fill prescriptions for them anymore.
The overreaction is causing real suffering to a ton of people who can't get adequate pain relief. People are killing themselves because they just can't take it anymore, which is obviously worse than the other risks, which are again far smaller than commonly believed. We need to get the word out that they absolutely can be taken safely. One opioid was even reformulated to make it resistant to abuse, so what's the point of clamping down on that too?
In 2015, opioid deaths were above 33,000. Yet no one talks about the approximately 16,500 people who died in 2015 from NSAIDs, or the
400,000 who died from cigarettes in the US, and millions more around the world.
The opioid epidemic is absolutely a problem, but it's not prescriptions. We need to calm down and look at the true sources and address them, though I know that the systemic societal issues driving people to opioids in the first place are going to be very difficult to fix and keeping out the illegal drugs is impossible, but decriminalizing personal use to make it easier for people to get treatment for their addictions would be a great start.
TLDR: Prescription opioids are not the problem, illegal ones and the reasons people are turning to them to the first place are, and the overreaction is causing a lot of pain patients to suffer needlessly.