Like with many other public health crises, the opioid epidemic is frequently thought of as having just somehow happened, the result of a confluence of unintended consequences for which no single individual or corporation is really at fault but that must now be dealt with collectively. But journalist Christopher Glazek in a long article in Esquire magazine, traces how the secretive Sackler family, through their private company called Purdue Pharma in the US and Napp Pharmaceuticals in the UK that invented OxyContin, downplayed the risks of addiction and exploited doctors’ confusion over the drug’s strength and, helped create the opioid crisis. What they did was take the drug and market it as the salve for a wide array of problems, the same strategy they had used earlier to make Valium a huge marketing success.
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