The origin of America’s opioid crisis – the ludicrously profitable proliferation of addictive pain medications whose abuse killed nearly half a million Americans between 2000 and 2019 – arguably comes down to a single sentence. In 1996, the drug company Purdue Pharma, then owned and controlled by Mortimer and Raymond Sackler and their heirs, began selling the opioid drug OxyContin. “There is no opioid crisis without OxyContin,” Gibney told the Guardian. In the case of opioid addiction and abuse in the US, “the crisis was manufactured. But it was a process for him to see the business of opioids as less passive crisis than criminal negligence.

Source: The Guardian May 10, 2021 06:00 UTC