OxyContin Makers Admit Deception - washingtonpost.com

OxyContin Makers Admit Deception - washingtonpost.com: "The manufacturer of the potent painkiller OxyContin and three current and former executives at the company yesterday pleaded guilty to falsely marketing the drug in a way that played down its addictive properties and led to scores of people becoming addicted, prosecutors said."

The Washington Post doesn't go into much detail on the impact of Purdue Pharma's evildoing. Here's a snippet out of a 2001 Guardian article:

In this part of West Virginia, and the neighbouring hill counties of Virginia and Kentucky, they call it "hillbilly heroin" or "poor man's heroin". They also call it a plague. In the past two years it has caused scores of deaths in the region in the form of overdoses, suicides and car wrecks. In the words of Michael Pratt, a Kentucky prosecutor trying in vain to combat its influence: "The bodies are stacking up like cordwood".