Thanks for your comments. First, I must admit to having a bad case of prolix disease so this reply will have to appear over two posts. ;-)

My main concern is driven by the fact that corporate memory seems to have deserted so many important institutions these days, matters once long settled have been forgotten or depreciated in importance by the very institutions that are supposed to be upholding those ideas. Rigor, ethics and ideals have seemingly flown out the window.

It seems very strange to me to chuck out ideas that have long since been proven to work but I accept it's part and parcel of the current zeitgeist to devalue ideas from the past without first evaluating them as to whether they're worthwhile or not. This wasn't the case until perhaps the late 1970s or early '80s, that's when postmodernist ideas began to take hold in a big way.

I'm not against all postmodernist ideas per se but some have had a devastating effect on science and engineering: once facts were just that—facts—not just 'possible maybes' as so many people consider them to be nowadays. Reason, logic and logical argument just aren't fashionable these days. Now the public's faith in science seems badly mauled and I reckon that's a bad thing. Whilst cultural changes outside of science have largely contributed to its fall from grace, there's also little doubt that science has shot itself in the foot far too many times in recent decades for it not to have had a significant negative effect on public perception. There's been too many major scientific scandals that should never have happened, some scientists have much to answer for, and scientists generally have a great deal of PR work to do to clean up the mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_misconduct_.... Nevertheless, I strongly believe that science is still the best discipline we have to prevent us from returning to the dark ages.

If you want to get an appreciation of how significantly the public's attitude to science has changed for the worse since the mid 1950s then it's worth looking at this short 1955 doco for school kids titled Why Study Science?. It's a bit trite and clichéd but there's no hiding the fact that back then the public held science in very high regard, it also shows that science and engineering held absolutely prominent and unquestionable places in society at that time: https://archive.org/details/WhyStudy1955_2. My, my how times have changed, it's a shame this doco doesn't get more of an airing by scientists (and in fact by everyone), as it seems to me to be a good reference point for comparison; moreover most scientist will be too young to have experienced how the public perceived their profession during its halcyon days, which alone is a good enough reason for them to view it.

What is so damn annoying to me about this opioid crisis is that many of those who are implicated in its creation were trained in scientific disciplines, what they did was the antithesis of what science stands for. I would further add that I don't believe doctors and scientists would have been implicated to such a degree back half a century ago (that's not to say they were above reproach, far from it).

Reading the above, I must appear to be an apologist for a past era but I'd insist it's not so. I haven't the time to expand and justify the last sentence in detail but I'll add this much. Whilst I was too young to be one of the targets of that 1955 doco, I did grow up somewhat later whilst that ethos was still current (as mentioned, things changed in the '80s and onwards). This meant that I not only learned science within that earlier culture but also I'm inculcated to think that way. Furthermore, as I'm writing this in October 2020, it means that I've witnessed the public's change in attitude towards science over these decades and, in my opinion, it's been nothing short of dramatic in the negative sense.

It's not as if back then people were slaves to the scientific elite, that's definitely not so as that was the time of the Cold War and the Bomb so there was much criticism of those who developed and tested it. The disparity between then and now is that in those days most people had a much better understanding of the difference between scientific progress for the betterment of society and science that is used for nefarious purposes and I believe that the media had much do with this more positive attitude, as reporting was much more objective and balanced back then. Furthermore, we didn't have the internet full of millions of self-styled experts to criticize science (and for that matter criticize just about everything else, both good and bad). Unfortunately, internet's 'noise' now drowns out much worthwhile stuff.

As I alluded to at the outset, there are many reasons for the opioid crisis, but I return to the fact that these days institutions such as the FDA simply do not have structures in place to remember the importance of why certain decisions were made in the past. The fact that opioid addiction has been high on the medical agenda for ≈150 years and very high on the agenda of both local and international politics for about a century and the fact that it has been effectively forgotten by the FDA says not only a great deal about said institution but also much about modern culture.

[If all goes well, I'll provide you with some examples in a reply below.]