By 2003, more than half of the prescribers of OxyContin nationwide were primary care doctors, who had little pain-management training and were under pressure to get patients in and out of their offices. Oxy prescriptions for chronic pain rose from 670,000 in 1997 to 6.2 million in 2002. Those for cancer pain rose from 250,000 to just over a million over the same time.
