Even as street drugs have overtaken prescription products as the leading culprits in the crisis, it has become only clearer that the opioid disaster began with government-regulated painkillers. As many as four out of five heroin users have reported that they started out by misusing prescription drugs. An enormous public health crisis began not with hand-to-hand transactions on darkened street corners or covert shipments over the border but under the sanitized fluorescent glare of neighborhood pharmacies and Walgreens. The drugs at issue were packaged and trafficked by men in suits who worked
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