Opioid pain relievers in unprecendented number year after year were prescribed from coast to coast. They were overlaid on American populations riven by trauma or generational poverty, or well-to-do areas with large houses and barren sidewalks. They spilled over a culture in which so many addictive legal substances and services were already finely tuned to attack our brains. Predictably, narcotic pain relievers turned out to be addictive for a lot of patients the longer they used them. The pills sloshed across the country and onto street black markets, where many others grew addicted. Some of
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