I'm aware. It doesn't change the point I made. They could have simply criminalized everything and made the criminal penalties more onerous. Which is what they they did previously.
Look up the fear of the "Negro cocaine fiend" in the early 1900s which led to the Harrison Act and the subsequent Narcotics Control Act. First, they heavily restricted who could produce the legal drug then they slapped criminal sentences on people in possession of the formerly legal drug. There's no difference here between the 2. We already had some restrictions and the pathway has been trod before. Increase restrictions and then criminalize possession.
With opioids, they took a different path. They refused to curtail production and they refused to criminalize possession, as they had in decades past. This means that the only pathway they left themselves were simply litigation against individual producers, like the Sacklers. So, yeah, if this was a different group of people you definitely would have gotten a different outcome. Because they would have criminalized even the legal production and possession of the drug first. Then they wouldn't bother with litigation and settlements, they would have just thrown everyone in jail.
You might re-focus on the difference between opioids from a pharmaceutical company and heroin on the street but we've done this before as well. They took crack and cocaine and treated them differently as well. The well known 100:1 ratio.
None of the drug stuff is new but the response is definitely far kinder than in the past.