Worldwide pharmaceutical opiate production rose steadily. But it was the United States, the country where the Englishman Robert Twycross once smelled “the fear of addiction” as he stepped from an airplane, that now consumed 83 percent of the world’s oxycodone and fully 99 percent of the world’s hydrocodone (the opiate in Vicodin and Lortab). “Gram for gram,” a group of specialists wrote in the journal Pain Physician in 2012, “people in the United States consume more narcotic medication than any other nation worldwide.”
