I've been suspicious of the CDC for a while now. They were still fearmongering marijuana on Fox in 2019.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/5985775287001#sp=show-clips

Also, correct me if I'm wrong and this site can't be trusted. Anecdotally, I know people who have chronic pain and are suffering because of these restrictions.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/09/09/time-revise-cdc-‘get-informed’-web-page-15016

Interjection of Hype

The CDC writes:

"Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids were more than four times higher in 2018 than in 1999. In 2018, almost 32 percent of all U.S. opioid overdose deaths involved a prescription opioid. Even though the number of overdose deaths involving prescription opioids decreased in 2018, more than 232,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids since 19991. Overdose is not the only risk related to prescription opioids. Anyone who takes prescription opioids can become addicted to them."

My response to these assertions is as follows:

The term "overdose deaths involving prescription opioids" seems to be a deliberate cherry-picking of evidence, to overstate the role of legitimately prescribed opioid pain relievers. Reality is far more ambiguous. There is evidence from multiple published studies that when prescription opioids are found in a postmortem blood tox screen, they are almost always accompanied by non-prescribed or illegal opioids and alcohol. [3, 4] Our so-called opioid crisis is largely one characterized by patients self-medicating by poly-pharmacy due to under-treatment of their pain, plus addicts who have never had a doctor's prescription. The idea that anyone who takes prescription opioids can become addicted to them is simply an outright damned lie! As we are informed by no less an authority than Dr. Nora Volkow and her co-author Dr. McMillan of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “addiction is not a predictable outcome of prescribing,” and is in fact quite rare even among patients with identified risk factors that may increase vulnerability to substance abuse disorder. [5] The fraction of opioid-naive patients prescribed opioids after surgery who are later diagnosed with substance use disorder is on the order of 0.6%. Studies demonstrating this reality have assessed medical insurance records of over 1.5 million patients. [6] Such numbers almost certainly represent an upper limit, given that the diagnoses are most often made by general practitioners who have no training in the assessment of addiction, and who may render the diagnosis to justify discharging patients whom they regard as a risk to their license because of the hostile regulatory environment."