Following the event, President Ron Liebowitz and his wife, Jessica, hosted a dinner. U.S. Senator Edward Markey sent a video message viewed during the dinner. “I pledge my support for your work,” Markey said. “I believe the people here tonight can and will make a difference.”

When Kolodny’s not researching the most effective ways to prevent and treat addiction, he travels the country warning doctors’ groups, the media and policymakers about the crisis. “For years, nobody wanted to hear about it. Now everybody wants to hear about it at exactly the same time,” he sighs.

He’s become an unlikely celebrity. As he talks in his office at Heller, an NBC camera crew keeps interrupting him to line up shots — one crew member swivels around the table with a handheld camera; another shoots through the doorway with her iPhone. “It’s a little distracting,” Kolodny says good-naturedly as the cameraman aims up at him from a kneeling position on the floor. Wearing a puffy vest over his Oxford shirt, his hands awkwardly pushed into his pockets, Kolodny looks every bit the psychiatrist. He exudes a soft-spoken charisma, able to translate policy with passion.

Kolodny grew up on Long Island, where his father was a doctor and everyone assumed he would become one, too. “Jackie Mason used to joke that every Jewish kid’s supposed to be a doctor; or, if their brain doesn’t work too good, a lawyer; or, if their brain doesn’t work at all, an accountant,” he deadpans. After medical school, Kolodny was drawn to psychiatry. “I wasn’t really interested in sticking people with needles or cutting people. You could just talk to someone, which was nice.”

His real interest, however, lay in public health, which had captured his imagination as a kid when he read a book about epidemiologists fighting disease outbreaks. At New York City’s health department, he approached the outbreak of opioid addiction as a puzzle to be solved. The first clue surfaced in a 2006 study by CDC physician Len Paulozzi, which included a neat graph with two rising parallel lines — one the number of opioid painkillers prescribed by doctors, the other the number of deaths from opioid overdoses.

“That was sort of an aha moment for me,” Kolodny says. He naively assumed that, if the graph were true, the policy solution would be straightforward.

Yet almost as soon as Paulozzi’s report came out, pain organizations funded by pharmaceutical companies challenged it, placing the blame for the rising epidemic not on overprescribing doctors but on addicts and criminals who steal or divert legitimate opioid prescriptions to abuse them. The pain organizations argued a reduction in prescribing would penalize pain patients for the bad behavior of drug abusers. Federal agencies fell for this argument.

“Almost everything coming from the federal government was focused on ‘How do we keep kids from getting into grandma’s medicine chest?’” Kolodny says. “Nobody asked, ‘Why does every grandma now have opioids in her medicine chest?’”

Kolodny might have been persuaded by the pain groups if he hadn’t been seeing firsthand the impact of the drugs on patients, many of whom had been legitimately prescribed opioids for pain and were unable to stop taking them.

One opioid survivor, Betts Tully, was prescribed OxyContin in 2001 after two back operations. The medicine never completely eased her pain, so her doctor kept prescribing more — increasing her dosage from 20 mg to 280 mg over six months. Kolodny read about Tully’s ordeal in an Op-Ed she wrote for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“I was no longer working or talking to friends and family,” she says. “All I did was stay in bed.” When she stopped taking the pills, withdrawal symptoms made her feel even worse. Because the drugs muddled her mind, she couldn’t see the problem clearly. It took an intervention by her daughter for her to get help, then two years of gradually reducing the prescription drug to get all the opiates out of her system.

Kolodny accompanied Tully and other patients to U.S. Food and Drug Administration meetings to advocate for tighter controls on the drug companies. Wherever he went, he found pharmaceutical company representatives with their own patients, begging policymakers not to take measures that could reduce what they said were needed pain medications.

An epidemic of overprescribing doctors

Purdue Pharma, which introduced OxyContin in 1995, aggressively marketed the drug, says Kolodny, deceiving doctors on the safety and effectiveness of its long-term use. (In February, Purdue announced it would no longer market opioid drugs to doctors.)

In 2010, to counter misinformation about opioids, Kolodny, other like-minded doctors, and patients founded Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP). PROP exposed Big Pharma’s marketing efforts by publicizing how pain groups funded by pharmaceutical companies promoted aggressive prescribing as safe and effective.