A year after starring in the Purdue Pharma video, that same doctor, South Carolina pain specialist Dr. Alan Spanos, gave a lecture insisting that patients with chronic noncancer pain should be trusted to decide for themselves how many painkillers they could take without overdosing—just as the morphine-dispensing doctors had said of wounded Civil War veterans a century before. He reasoned that the patients would simply “go to sleep” before they stopped breathing.
