Hi listeners, we're doing something a little different today and sharing with you a preview

of a show we love, revisionist history.

You might be familiar with revisionist history.

It's best selling author Malcolm Gladwell's podcast that reexamines something from the past

and asks whether we got it right the first time.

This season Malcolm's obsessed with experiments, natural experiments, scientific experiments,

thought experiments.

His obsession takes him everywhere from salt factories to the set of the original A Star

is born movie.

The goal is to get us to approach evidence and that what if question with more open minds?

And this episode preview you're about to hear is a perfect example of why that is important.

Back in the 1930s a guy named Paul Madden ran the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.

He was responsible for stopping the use of illegal drugs in the state at a time when anti-drug

crusaders feared doctors might be driving drug addiction.

So he enacted an expensive burdensome annoying bit of bureaucratic anti-drug hysteria known

as triplicate program and it made every doctor in the state miserable.

Because it involved a ton of paperwork around prescribing addictive painkillers and nobody

likes paperwork.

But Madden insisted this kind of paperwork would save lives.

Fast work to the 1990s and the early 2000s.

When opioids were being prescribed as painkillers at a rapid rate and killing tens of thousands

of Americans due to overdoses.

...