Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

by Malcolm Gladwell

In Chapter 6 we discussed the fact that superspreaders are profoundly different from the rest of us: There is something inherent in their physiology that makes them capable of producing orders of magnitude more virus than everyone else. The same was true of their superspreaders, Purdue discovered: They weren’t wired like most doctors. When the Purdue sales representatives downplayed the risks of addiction—making the nonsensical claim that the long, slow, smooth pace with which the drug entered the bloodstream meant that it produced none of the euphoric highs that led to dependency—the superspreader believed them. When it became clear that OxyContin was being abused—that people were just grinding up OxyContin tablets and snorting the powder, getting twelve hours’ worth of opioid in a single giddy rush—the superspreader was indifferent, or oblivious. The superspreader thought handing out drugs willy-nilly was what a doctor did. One of Purdue’s targets in Tennessee was a doctor named Michael Rhodes, who ran a pain clinic just north of Nashville.