Plant Owners Known for Wealth, Philanthrophy,” Hackensack Record (NJ), April 27, 1995.
As its patent was set to expire: Stacy Wong, “Thrust Under Microscope, Stamford Drug Company’s Low Profile Shattered by Controversy Over Abuse of Painkiller OxyContin,” Hartford Courant, Sept. 2, 2001.
launched in the nation’s best-known corporate tax haven: Leslie Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven,” New York Times, June 30, 2012. Because corporations can lower their taxes by shifting royalties and other revenues to holding companies in Delaware, where they are not taxed, the state is particularly appealing to shell companies.
“If you take the medicine”: Barry Meier, Pain Killer: A “Wonder” Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death (New York: Rodale Press, 2003), 43.
“exquisitely rare”: Ibid., 190.
at the end of Alexander Hamilton’s ill-fated duel: John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004; originally published in 1959), 574. Hamilton recovered from a 1793 bout of yellow fever after taking laudanum, 380.
one of Boston’s leading merchants: Opium money made by Thomas S. Perkins helped spawn the Industrial Revolution, according to Martha Bebinger, “How Profits from Opium Shaped Nineteenth-Century Boston,” WBUR, July 31, 2017.
the opioid-addicted in China had long referred to as “yen”: Thomas Nordegren, The A–Z Encyclopedia of Alcohol and Drug Abuse (Parkland, FL: Brown Walker, 2002), 691. “Yen” refers both to restless sleep during withdrawal and to the craving for drugs.
(What modern-day addicted users): William S. Burroughs, Junkie (New York: Ace Books, 1953), 155.
“I consider it my duty”: Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 69.
it became standard practice: Soldier’s disease as defined in Gerald Starkey, “The Use and Abuse of Opiates and Amphetamines,” in Patrick Healy and James Manak, eds., Drug Dependence and Abuse Resource Book (Chicago: National District Attorneys Association, 1971), 482–84. While Starkey puts the number of addicted veterans at 400,000, some modern-day historians believe the figure is lower and are more likely to cite Horace Day’s 1868 Opium Habit, which estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 Americans were addicted, as also described in Dillon J. Carroll, “Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction in the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Civil War Era, Nov. 22, 2016. David F. Musto puts the 1900 figure at 250,000 in The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5.
The addiction was particularly severe: Carroll, “Civil War Veterans.”
“Since the close of the war”: “Opium and Its Consumers,” New York Tribune, July 10, 1877.
“I know persons”: Letter by Dr. W. G. Rogers, Daily Dispatch (Richmond, VA), Jan. 25, 1884.
It was a safe family drug: David F. Musto, ed., One Hundred Years of Heroin (Westport, CT: Auburn House, 2002), 4.
it also seemed to strengthen respiration: Ibid.
Free samples were mailed: David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 91, 231.
“almost criminal”: “Women Victims of Morphine; Physicians Discuss the Danger in the Use of the Drug,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1895.
By 1900, more than 250,000 Americans: Musto, The American Disease, 5.
for eight years you could buy heroin: Some states had regional versions of the Harrison Act before 1914, but that didn’t prevent a person from going the mail-order route, according to historian Nancy D. Campbell; author interview, Oct. 25, 2017.
then called “vicious”: Author interview, Campbell, Sept. 3, 2017.
“the American Disease”: Musto, One Hundred Years of Heroin, xvi.
now reliant on criminal drug networks: The drug had been interdicted on Chinese ships, where it was hidden inside the rinds of oranges and bars of soap and, once, in 1924, in the bodies of dead kittens found in a passenger’s basket, according to “China Again in Grip of Opium and Morphia,” New York Times, Aug. 24, 1924.
Think of the “Des Moines woman”: Daily State (Richmond, VA), May 3, 1873 (wire report).
“‘contain nothing injurious to the youngest babe’”: “Secretary Warns Mothers of Doped Medicines,” Evening News (Roanoke, VA), March 1, 1914 (wire reports).
David Haddox touted OxyContin: “If you take the medicine like it is prescribed, the risk of addiction when taking an opioid is one-half of 1 percent,” said Purdue’s medical director Dr. J. David Haddox, as outlined in Meier, Pain Killer, 45.
The 1996 introduction of OxyContin coincided: Laurie Tarkan, “New Efforts Against an Old Foe: Pain,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 2000.
Purdue’s bean counters gushed: All budget plans cited in this book came from internal documents I obtained that were originally subpoenaed for the federal investigation.
“We have an opportunity…”: Purdue Pharma’s 2000 Budget Plan, 51–52.
A 2000 New York Times article: Tarkan,