They didn't hide the crisis. They gave it a name. And the name gave everyone permission to keep going.
In 1952, three brothers from Brooklyn bought a small pharmaceutical company that made earwax remover and laxatives. What they built from it became one of the most consequential business empires in American history — and one of its most destructive.
Episode 9 goes inside the machine. How a marketing method born in the 1950s — targeting doctors instead of patients, funding the research, building the consensus — turned a controlled-release opioid into the best-selling painkiller in America. How a single sentence, drafted in a hotel room near the FDA offices in Rockville, Maryland, opened a market worth billions. And how one word — pseudoaddiction — gave an entire system permission to stop looking at what was happening.
Curtis Wright approved the drug. He went to work for the company one year later at triple his government salary.
David Haddox coined the term pseudoaddiction. He later became a vice president at Purdue Pharma.
Alice Fisher overruled the prosecutors who had spent four years building a felony case. She went to a prestigious law firm. Rudy Giuliani, Mary Jo White, and Howard Shapiro had walked into the Justice Department on Purdue's behalf to make sure that happened.
Eight hundred thousand people did not die because of evil. They died because of normal. Normal career decisions. Normal salary negotiations. Normal marketing. And a word that gave everyone in the room permission to move on to the next case.
This is Edge of the Story. We're not investigating stories. We're investigating moments people noticed.
READ FIRST — PRIMARY SOURCES
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty — Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, 2021)
The definitive account. Everything in this episode traces to this book or to the primary sources it cites.
Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America — Gerald Posner (Avid Reader Press, 2020)
Source for the declassified FBI files on Communist Party membership and Soviet connections.
DOJ Prosecution Memo — Kirk Ogrosky, October 2006
https://www.mass.gov/doc/ogrosky-memo/download
Senators Hassan and Whitehouse demand DOJ release the Purdue memo — 2019
https://www.hassan.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senators-hassan-whitehouse-press-justice-department-for-2006-purdue-pharma-prosecution-memo
PSEUDOADDICTION — THE SCIENCE (OR LACK THEREOF)
Pseudoaddiction: Fact or Fiction? — Current Addiction Reports (2015)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40429-015-0074-7
Virginia AG lawsuit against Purdue — pseudoaddiction section (2018)
https://oag.state.va.us/consumer-protection/index.php/news/288-june-27-2018-attorney-general-herring-sues-purdue-pharma-for-lies-that-helped-create-and-prolong-opioid-crisis
THE SACKLER FAMILY
Sackler family — Wikipedia (comprehensive sourced overview)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
FBI Files Expose Purdue’s Sackler Family — Just the Facts Media
https://www.justthefacts.media/p/the-red-oxycontin-kings
Purdue and Sackler Family $7.4B Settlement —
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2025/attorney-general-james-secures-74-billion-purdue-pharma-and-sackler-family
Harrington v. Purdue Pharma — Supreme Court Opinion, June 27, 2024
https://www.supremecourt.go
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