How the opioid crisis became the biggest drug epidemic

Opioid addiction is the biggest drug epidemic in U.S. history. How’d we get here? More

Every day brings another story about the depth of the country’s opioid crisis. A rise of pain killer prescriptions from doctors and a pharmaceutical industry eager to boost sales in the 1990s sparked a wave of addiction that shot up by almost 500 percent in the last 15 years. As a prologue to our series covering the opioid crisis, “America Addicted,” William Brangham reports on how we got here.

AIR DATE 9/29/17