A while later, Tommy had his wisdom teeth removed. Dentists, too, were prescribing large bottles of narcotic painkillers—thirty days’ worth of pills for pain that dentists knew would last two or three days. This was standard now. Every year, 48 million routine surgeries took place in America. Virtually every patient during those years left with renewable prescriptions for big bottles of thirty, sixty, or ninety pain pills of one brand or another. Thus a firehose of prescription narcotics blasted at the US public for close to two decades.
