General Discussion

A few points:
1) It's not the FDA's job to teach the public about tolerance build up.
2) There isn’t a universal law that every drug with tolerance must use that exact word on the pharmacy bottle sticker, but for opioids and similar controlled substances, FDA‑approved labeling and Medication Guides are required to explain the risks that flow from tolerance—dose escalation, dependence, withdrawal, and overdose—in language aimed at both prescribers and patients.
3) If a given person is not capable of deducing that the reason they keep needing to take more and more of a drug to achieve the same effect is due to the phenomenon known as "tolerance", I'm not really sure I'd laud them as someone particularly "capable of thinking for themselves"
4) People who become addicted to meds like opioids, benzos or amphetamines, become (in varying degrees) incapable of "thinking for themselves" in the way that most people would define the term. One's addiction begins directing their actions in a way that people who've never experienced it will never quite understand.

I'd say there's a case to be made for legalizing everything, trying to educate everyone about the dangers of every particular drug/drug class, and letting the chips fall where they may, in the interest of "freedom" and because the War on (some) Drugs has been proven to be an abject failure anyway, just like Prohibition was back in the day. I think it can be argued that the "War On Drugs" is worse than the drugs themselves. I have a bit of a libertarian streak in this particular regard.

But at the same time, the number of people who finally get clean either because of a jail stint or mandated drug treatment (or both), often brought about because of the illegality of "possession" or "pharmacy shopping" or the like, is a pretty sizeable percentage of the total who do. Some people simply have to get locked up to stop, they cannot do it all on their own. That's why there is, and has been, a booming "addiction rehab center" business for many decades in this country.

So it's reasonable to presume that many more people would end up addicted and/or dead if drugs were all uncontrolled vs. not. We saw what happened in the 2000's when Oxycontin flowed like a river, we're still trying to clean up THAT mess, and the shit was still a controlled substance at the time, not just outright legal.

I think if anyone over 21 could walk into a corner store and buy hydrocodone and oxycodone and hydromorphone and oxymorphone and cocaine and meth and valium at an affordable price like they can with alcohol, my guess is we'd have about 10-15% of the US population addicted to opioids within 5 years, and another 10-15% strung out on one of the other classes of drugs, and some would be hooked on both uppers and downers.

Is it worth it for the "freedom", and the massive reduction of violence and crime related to the illicit drug industry that would occur? Like I say, it could be argued the answer is yes. But it would be an argument with two pretty decent "sides" to it, not a slam-dunk