Because addicts kill themselves with their not-so-smart behaviors and their families and the drug treatment industry then blame doctors for it.

Addicts love to portay themselves as the pitiful, blameless victims of drug-slinging doctors. Once their stupidity kills them, their families believe that bullshit story and become activists against doctors since they can't except that their dead loved one was just another junkie who did themselves in with their own actions.

Even here we regularly have people pushing that ridiculous narrative. "It all started with one prescription..." Yeah, and you innocently failed to follow instructions, crushed and snorted those pills and then started shooting up. to the attic, the problem was the prescription. But in reality the problem was the stupid addict doing stupid things.

And so when policy meetings are held, witness after witness shows up claiming that their dead loved one died because some dentist prescribed them oxycodone once after a procedure years before and that somehow forced them to start shooting up heroin...and the politicians and policymakers believe that bullshit.

So I guess in my mind it all boils down to this: addicts (and by extension their families and the addiction treatment industry) cannot accept responsibility for their own actions and so they aggressively blame anyone and anything else they can.

I do not believe in any grand conspiracies. People and bureaucracies are too incompetent for conspiracies to work. Conspiracy theories are typically people just filling in the blanks with their overactive imaginations.