A Real-World Dr. Evil: Big Pharma's Conspiracy to Game Medical Literature

A never-surfaced litigation exhibit shows an opiate producer used the "Dr. Evil" character to describe plans to popularize addictive drug use. - MATT BIVENS, M.D.

• “Do more reading,” I’d been told as a medical student when I worried aloud about overly liberal use of morphine (see Part I). Had I obediently done so, a thorough review of the medical literature could have turned up many studies demonstrating that a casually-written opioid prescription can wreck a person’s life.
• But to find them I would have had to sift through many hundreds of peer-reviewed publications arguing the opposite: that addiction with opioid prescriptions never really happens...