LAUSR

----“We didn’t have a heroin crisis in America before OxyContin was approved and started being handed out like candy...We could fix the majority of this problem with a click of our fingers,” declared Vermont’s Governor, Pete Shumlin, in 2016.1 A crisis unleashed in large part by a torrent of opioid prescribing has taken, by some estimates, the lives of 391,180 Americans since 2000.2 As clinicians reconsidered the value of a muchoversold drug class, the institutions that govern, regulate, pay, and police health care pushed for reductions.3 The patients on opioids long-term were, by competing accounts, in pain, dependent, addicted, or “hooked,” as the Washington Post put it in 2016.4