A century earlier, Bayer had marketed heroin as morphine without the unpleasant side effects, even though heroin was actually more powerful than morphine and every bit as addictive. Now, in internal discussions at Purdue headquarters in Norwalk, Richard and his colleagues entertained the notion of a similar marketing strategy. In truth, oxycodone wasn’t weaker than morphine, either. In fact it was roughly twice as potent. The marketing specialists at Purdue didn’t know why, exactly, doctors had this misapprehension about its being weaker, but it might have been because for most physicians
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