Pain Killer: A 'Wonder' Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death

Meier was the first journalist to document the OxyContin catastrophe in depth, filing stories from the Virginia coalfields where addiction was already destroying communities years before the mainstream media noticed. His account of Purdue Pharma's marketing strategy — the deliberate misrepresentation of addiction risk to doctors — is both the original record and the template for every subsequent investigation. Written in 2003. The deaths continued for two more decades.