Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:32 pm on 4 December 2019.
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. In terms of the reality of this threat, we've heard a lot of people using the word 'scaremongering' and I just want to say a little bit more about a matter that was touched upon in Delyth Jewell's contribution with regard to the opioid crisis in the USA. Now, we have all heard of this. It crops up in popular fiction. We have hundreds of thousands of US citizens addicted to substances that they should never have been prescribed in the first place.
Opioids, of course, are properly used for patients who are terminally ill, who are suffering very severe pain, but they have been prescribed across the USA willy-nilly for all kinds of conditions for which they are entirely unsuitable. Over 70,000 deaths last year were attributed to this addiction; over 400,000 in the last 20 years. So, how was this able to come to be? Well, this was able to come to be from a complicated set-up that was to do with the deregulation of some kinds of drugs, the inappropriate regulation of others, the hyperinflation around certain, perhaps more appropriate, medicines, which Delyth Jewell has already touched on.
Now, we are all, I think, in this Chamber—I'd accept that Mark Isherwood probably is as well—[Interruption.] Of course.