Comment by johnnienaked a day ago
Do you even remember what you wrote?
>Also... isn't the whole opioid addiction crisis basically because people were in fact buying regulated ~heroin?
Of course not, this is a ridiculous comment. People have been addicted to opiates for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Blaming oxycontin is passé
So you only meant some of it then? Why did you say whole?
People aren't mind readers. If you mean some, don't say whole and you'll probably avoid confusing people.
Because there is something that people these days commonly refer to as "the opioid crisis" (or epidemic) [1].
And overprescribed pain meds are seen as a large cause of it / aggravating factor.
So yeah, "that whole thing". It's not an unusual expression, that I know of.
It might not be unusual, but in this context it was confusing
Responding to the Opioid Crisis in North America and Beyond: Recommendations of the Stanford-Lancet Commission
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9261968/
The first wave of the opioid crisis began in the 1990s when the long-acting opioid OxyContin and other high potency opioids were employed for an extremely wide array of patients.