More Like a Nicholas Cage Film –
2018 – Purdue Pharma and El Chapo had provided kindling: The pharma company’s unprecedented marketing campaign for its blockbuster OxyContin painkiller did not stop with pill sales. Purdue marketing helped ensure that for the first time in U.S. history, heavy doses of one of the most addictive substances known to man would be prescribed by family doctors for everything from sprained ankles to migraines. Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, long focused on marijuana and transporting South American cocaine, took note of America’s new-found appetite for narcotics and began seeding mountainsides with poppy plants, the source of heroin. But it took Florida to set the heroin epidemic ablaze, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.
