By the end of 2000, Purdue had passed out fifteen thousand copies of an OxyContin video called “I Got My Life Back: Patients in Pain Tell Their Story,” without submitting it to the FDA for review, as required by the agency. The video, available for checkout from doctors’ offices, lauded OxyContin’s effect on patients’ quality of life and minimized its risks. The doctor-narrator heralded the new term “pseudo addiction,” wherein opioid-seeking patients “look like a drug addict because they’re pursuing pain relief…[when in reality] it’s relief-seeking behavior mistaken as drug addiction.” He then
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