Passage 2 The trips to resorts in Florida, Arizona and California were a great chance for medics to network.
And the visits were all expenses paid. But such events laid the groundwork for a national crisis. From
1996 to 2001, American drug giant Purdue Pharma held more than 40 national “pain management
symposia” at picturesque locations. The healthcare professionals had been specially invited, whisked
to the conferences to be drilled on promotional materials about the firm’s new star drug, OxyContin,
and recruited as advocates, the US government later documented. But OxyContin was to become
ground zero in an opioid crisis that has now engulfed the United States.
The pill comprises oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opioid loosely related to morphine and
originally based on elements of the opium poppy. Such strong painkillers were traditionally used to
ease cancer pain, but beginning in the mid-1990s, pills based on oxycodone began being branded and
aggressively marketed for chronic pain instead—a nagging back injury from manual labor or a car
accident, for example.
Prescriptions issued for OxyContin in the US increased tenfold from 1996 to 2002. A bulletin
from the American Public Health Association in 2009, reviewing the rise of prescription opioids, is
titled, The promotion and marketing of OxyContin: Commercial triumph, public health tragedy. This
document also asserted that Purdue had played down the risks of addiction. By 2002, opioids
prescribed by doctors were killing 5,000 people a year in America and that number tripled over the
following decade.
【題組】47. Which of the following statements is NOT true?
(A) It is illegal to prescribe opioids in the mid-1990s in the US.
(B) Oxycodone was used to ease acute pain.
(C) Purdue Pharma did not tell the whole truth about OxyContin.
(D) Successful marketing strategies led to the high sales of OxyContin.
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