Once the opioid epidemic was off and running, the epidemiologist Mathew Kiang calculated, the top 1 percent of doctors “accounted for 49 percent of all opioid doses.” People like “the candyman” and Michael Rhodes prescribed 1,000 times more opioid doses than the average doctor. Purdue fueled an epidemic that would end up consuming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans based on the seduction of no more than a few thousand doctors concentrated in a handful of states.
