At a publicly traded company, there might have been a genuine reckoning after the 2007 guilty plea, with a bunch of people fired and a real commitment to systemic reform. But at Purdue, even David Haddox, who coined the term “pseudo-addiction,” still held a senior position. “To this day I’m just dumbfounded that passed the sniff test for all those years,” another new-guard employee said of the concept of pseudo-addiction. “The solution is just ‘Give them more opioids!’ I don’t think you need a PhD in pharmacology to know that’s wrong.”
