Now that OxyContin has been reformulated to make the opioid harder to snort, inject or chew, The New York Times reports that demand for other narcotics has increased. OxyContin is designed to slowly release its main ingredient, oxycodone, over the course of 12 hours. But after it was introduced in 1996, people began chewing, or crushing and then snorting or injecting the drug, to get an instant high. Some areas of the country have seen high rates of OxyContin addiction, and abuse of the drug has led to many overdose deaths. Now that the maker of the drug, Purdue Pharma, has made it more difficult to abuse, demand has risen for pure...

Academics PROFIT By Making the Case for Opioid Painkillers As an epidemic of narcotic painkiller abuse raged across America in 2006, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a medical journal report connecting deaths from those drugs to up to a 500% increase prescriptions. In that same journal, a couple of officials with a little-known group at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health took issue with the paper, issuing their own warning against any attempt to increase regulation of the drugs. But the article from the UW group did not disclose that over the last decade or so, as this...