Portenoy and Foley wrote a paper reporting those observations and submitted it to a medical journal called Pain. Opiates themselves were not inherently addictive, the authors suggested; a lot depended on the people taking them. Cited among the footnotes supporting the paper was a letter to the editor, by Jane Porter and Dr. Hershel Jick out of Boston, in a 1980 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. It was headlined “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.”
