Most people think our current opioid crisis began at the end of the past century. After all, it was in the 1990s when most of us began to hear news about a wonder drug that alleviated all of our pains and aches. Before that, all such wonder drugs were additive, yet Oxycodone, or as most of us know it, Oxycontin, promised no addition.
How could this be? How could such a drug exist? The answer is simple, it was false advertising and misinformation. In a recent NPR PodCast, they dive deep into the origins of opioids in America, which dates back to the 1800s and the discovery of morphine, the emergence of heroin as a prescription to morphine addiction, the commercialization of drugs to consumers, the criminalization of opioids to their re-emergence in recent days.
