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Several years ago I had this surgery they cut open my face. It was pretty intense when it was over the hospital sent me home with a prescription for oxy codone for the pain.

It was way more intense.

I took one of the pills. I got dizzy. I got anxious. I started slurring my words. It was way worse in experience than the surgery.

I stopped taking the oxy and realized I didn't even need the drugs. I wasn't even in pain.

But then I started wondering why I was given such potent painkillers in the first place.

My best guess was pharmaceutical companies are really powerful. And now there's a study that suggests my guess wasn't all that bad.

A study found recently that there seems to be a direct correlation between marketing for opioids. So like these drug companies send representatives to these doctors and directly market to them telling them, hey, you should prescribe our drug. It's going to be safe, effective, etc.

And there's a correlation between that kind of marketing and prescribing rates and opioid overdoses a year later.

Hermann Lopez writes about legal and illegal drugs for vox. He says this new study isn't the first to suggest the doctors are influenced by marketing from pharmaceutical companies.

One study that came out last year looked at sending these doctors to conferences, giving them paid travel, speaking fees, that kind of thing.

But one of the points in this paper is that some of the most effective marketing might be more subtle things, like just buying a meal and that alone will influence whether doctors prescribe the drugs.

Marketing these jagged little pills starts to really ramp up in the mid 90s.

In the mid 90s, Oxycontin came out and that led Purdue Farma, which created it to really start ramping up advertising and marketing campaign for it.

There's no question that our best strongest pain medicines are the opioids.

They don't wear out, they go on working, they do not have serious medical side effects.

And so these drugs, which I repeat, are our best strongest pain medications should be used much more than they are for patients in pain.

It's said that the drug was safe and effective, that doctors could prescribe it and they would see these dramatic benefits for people suffering from both acute pain and chronic pain.

And at the same time, other pharmaceutical companies jumped in, started advertising their opioids, started saying, hey, joining with Purdue, like these are safe and effective, we have these new types of drugs ready to go out to patients.

And this is really where we saw the opioid crisis start.

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