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The opioid epidemic has had a lot of faces over the last 25 years.

It really started as a prescription pain killer crisis and morphed into a heroin crisis

and then more recently into a fentanyl crisis.

So it has evolved over that time.

Patrick Radden-Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker who wrote Empire of Pain.

The secret history of the Sackler dynasty, which came out this year.

You basically have a public health crisis that has unfolded over a quarter of a century

now, really starting in the mid-1990s and has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I mean, conservatively half a million deaths.

And this estimate, half a million deaths, doesn't also capture the millions of people across

the U.S. right now living with an opioid use disorder.

It's been going on so long that it's easy to forget where this all started in medical

offices with doctors back in the 1980s in the U.K. and the U.S. wanting to break from

this old school attitude towards pain.

There was a tendency to just say, hey, grin and bear it.

You're going to have to deal with this pain.

And a lot of these revisionist doctors who were making this case argued that part of the

reason that pain wasn't aggressively treated is that you had this amazing solution, which

was the opioids, which was a kind of class of drug that derived from the opium poppy.

But that physicians had been too reluctant to prescribe these drugs because of a fear

of their addictiveness.

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