Today’s nationwide epidemic of opiate addiction was spawned in part by doctors who, with the best of intentions, wanted to help patients in pain, and by drug companies that said they had just the remedy – long-lasting, effective painkillers with none of the addictive qualities of their predecessors.

Hundreds of millions of prescriptions later, we know all three of those company claims to be false. Medications such as OxyContin have proved ineffective in treating the kind of chronic pain for which they are most often prescribed, and they have been widely successful at fostering addiction, setting the stage for the cheap and potent heroin that has devastated communities in every corner of the country.