During the months he spent working on Pain Killer, Barry Meier had not been publishing articles about OxyContin in the newspaper. But after the radio host Rush Limbaugh confessed, in the fall of 2003, that he had developed an addiction to OxyContin and other painkillers that had been prescribed to him for back pain, Meier wrote an article about the episode. With the book done and out, it appeared that he was back on the beat.
