Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup Originally published as The Hard Sell

by Evan Hughes

Portraits of the personalities and habits of key figures in the book are often informed by numerous sources who interacted with them, named and unnamed. No pseudonyms are used, and there are no composite characters. Direct quotation is almost always drawn from my firsthand participation or from a recording or transcript. In a few instances, if two sources remembered a remark in an identical way, or one person was certain of a verbatim wording that wasn’t disputed by anyone else present, I used quotation marks. But there is no “reconstructed” dialogue; I did not learn the gist of a conversation and render it in quotation marks.