Is Britain heading for an opioid crisis?

Almost everyone here that I’ve spoken to about it assumes that the opioid crisis in the United States won’t ever come to the UK. Yes, the problem there is accelerating. Drug overdose deaths in America are now at more than 100,000 a year. A few days ago the Lancet predicted 1.2 million dead by 2029 but… it couldn’t happen here. We hold up those three sacred letters — NHS — like a talisman to ward off the evil. We tut about Big Pharma and its undue influence in Washington, we remove the Sackler name from galleries and museums, and then we get back to watching America overdose on TV.

The opioid crisis in the US is almost its own entertainment genre these days, with any number of documentaries and dramas available to stream. If it’s the origin story you’re after then there’s Dopesick (Disney+), which covers the Sackler family, their company, Purdue Pharma, and its demonically successful attempt to push OxyContin, their addictive cash-cow painkiller, into blue-collar America.