The first time Ed Bisch heard the word “OxyContin,” his son was dead from it. If parents were slow to catch on to the epidemic, experts weren’t any quicker. The movement of OxyContin from the economically straitened hinterlands to the largely more affluent cities and suburbs in the early aughts reminded historian David Courtwright of the iatrogenic wave of opium and morphine addiction that stormed the nation exactly a century before. By the 1920s and 1930s, most of the small-town morphine addicts and Civil War veterans with soldier’s disease had died out, not long after the national
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