A Canadian doctor says a one paragraph letter in a prestigious medical journal was part of a push to convince physicians to prescribe opioids more freely by downplaying addiction risks. The 1980 letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine was titled, "Addiction Rare in Patients Treated With Narcotic." In a correspondence published in Wednesday's issue of the same journal, Juurlink and his co-authors analyzed more than 600 published references or citations to the letter up until March 30 of this year. A YouTube video from Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing titled "Long-term opioid therapy reconsidered: addiction is not rare in pain patients" describes how those campaigns to physicians were mounted and the resulting crisis two decades later. The risk of addiction from opioids in the real world isn't known.

Source: CBC News May 31, 2017 21:13 UTC