Dreamland

Dreamland blows open the story of the United States’ opioid crisis, from the frustrating greed and oversight that created it, how drug dealers accelerated it’s spread, and what we’re doing now to stop it.

Although the widespread effects of this dilemma are obvious now, it began slowly back in the 1980s.

It was 1984 when a drug company named Purdue came out with MS Contin, a morphine-based, time-release pain treatment pill. While it was originally for people on their death beds or those just out of surgery, it’s success soon got Purdue carried away.

In 1996, the company released a similar pill by the now infamous name of OxyContin. Its active ingredient was the opium derivative called oxycodone, which is similar to heroin.

The company again touted the pill’s time-release technology. Purdue got the FDA to approve the drug on the belief that this mechanism would limit addiction by restricting the highs and lows that opiates normally brought.

This became the hallmark of Purdue’s marketing tactics for OxyContin, bringing wild success.

Lurking underneath, however, was a lot of bad science. For one, the perceived addiction rates were so low because it was only used for testing in controlled hospital conditions instead of by the doctors outside hospitals that the company marketed the drug to.

What’s worse, one doctor who was simply compiling a hospital database found some information that would be misconstrued for years. Looking at the roughly 12,000 patients, he noticed only four developed painkiller addictions.

After publishing the finding in a short paragraph in the New England Journal of Medicine, the information spread like cancer. Some even mistakenly called it a “landmark study.”

It wasn’t long before the crisis was in full swing, only for drug dealers to make it worse.

By the time 2000 rolled around the opiate crisis was in full swing. Of the roughly 100 million Americans suffering from chronic pain, almost all of them were on opiates of some kind. Of the world’s entire supply of oxycodone, the US alone was consuming 86%. And the use of hydrocodone, another opiate, was up to 99% and the most prescribed individual drug in the country. Still today there are about 136 million prescriptions for these kinds of drugs every year. Along with a rise in prescriptions has also come a rise in recreational use as well. From 2002 to 2011 alone, 25 million Americans consumed prescription pills in a way other than their intended use. And the age at which people were abusing these drugs was dropping, too. According to the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 2.4 million people 12 years old and up had consumed prescription pills nonmedically for the first time…