While the potential risks of opioid prescribing for chronic non-cancer pain (CNCP) have long been known to addiction psychiatrists and pain researchers and clinicians, recent popular dramatizations of the opioid epidemic in the USA have brought the issue in to mainstream public sight. Hulu’s 2021 production Dopesick and Netflix’s 2023 release Painkiller both tell the story of the manufacturer of Oxycontin (Oxycodone), Purdue Pharma, and how development, testing and false and aggressive marketing of Oxycontin led to the current USA opioid crisis. Currently opioid consumption in the USA is almost double of any other country, consuming on average over 40,000 tons (per million inhabitants) they continue to rank the highest across the globe (INCB, 2019), compared to the UK who rank 15th. Moreover, the USA was identified as the world’s largest consumer of opioids with a 400% increase between the period 2000 and 2010, compared with a 65% increase in the UK during that time (Häuser et al., 2018). It is therefore not surprising that the USA has received a lot of attention in recent media and have declared a state of crisis regarding the prescription of opioid drugs for the treatment of CNCP....