This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Launched in 1996, Purdue’s aggressive marketing campaign for OxyContin convinced doctors that the company’s new formulation was safer and less addictive than other opiates. The company assured the medical community that pain was being undertreated, and that the new opiate could benefit not just cancer and surgery patients but people suffering from arthritis, back pain, and workplace injuries. The campaign produced an explosion in prescriptions for OxyContin that would earn the company’s owners, the Sackler family,* more than $35 billion, while leading to more than 230,000 deaths by overdose. But that figure grossly understates the number of casualties from OxyContin: thousands of people who became addicted to legal painkillers eventually turned to the underground when they could no longer obtain or afford prescription opiates; four out of five new heroin users used prescription painkillers first.