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        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.