“My camel could come 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was the best customer. He sent me a message when I was in rehabilitation, I had more material.” The Dealer offered him a cheaper price, thinking he would fall back, but Nan Goldin pulled out forces to refuse, aware that if he did not break the drug chain he had a short life.

Goldin became a renowned photographer in the alternative environments of New York in the 1970s and 1980s. It was then that he had to do his first rehabilitation to get rid of the most common drugs of the time. The monkeys suffering today have been provoked by law-loving businessmen and doctors, according to journalist Joanna Walters.

In 2014, a Berlin doctor recommended OxyContin to relieve left wrist tendinitis. “For the first time I was prescribed 40 milligrams and it caused me nausea, weakness. But over time, I needed 450 mg a day.” From time to time, it even snowed the pill into powder. Back in New York, when doctors denied the prescription, he went to the black market, looking for OxyContin, but also cheaper drugs, when he was in a rush of money.

Abandoned in March last year at the Massachusetts rehabilitation center, he started looking for information about OxyContini and realized that this drug is primarily responsible for the opioid crisis that has spread in the United States. The new drug epidemic in the United States has already caused more than 200,000 deaths at the hands of their partners.

But Goldin, who had always moved in the art world, knew something more serious: The company Purdue, which has managed to impose itself between doctors and people through OxyContin’s most ruthless marketing strategies, is from the Sackler family, from New York to London, from the philanthropists Sackler, sponsors of the most prestigious sections in the Guggenheim, the MET and other art temples. “I don’t know how they can live inside their skin.”

Last October, Patrick Radden Keef, in the journal The New Yorker, dedicated a deep dossier to the Sackler family: “The family built an empire of pain.” Title 2: “The Sackler Dynasty has generated billions of benefits with the ruthless marketing of its painkiller... and subjected to millions of drugs.”

Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler – the three deaths last year – doctors and businessmen hoarded one of the greatest fortunes of the EE.UU. USD 13 billion in Forbes, a more than Rockefeller treasury. “The Sacklers were frequently interviewed about their philanthropic works, but they rarely publicly talked about the business they had enriched: Purdue Pharma, of the three family, who developed the painkiller OxyContin in 1995.”

The whole establishment in medicine warmly welcomed OxyContini, considering that it was an excellent medication for patients with medium and severe pain, because it preserved its narcotic faculties gradually extending them. In addition, it would give Purdue some EUR 35 billion in profits.

The OxyContini molecule is oxykodone, the cousin of heroin twice as strong as chemistry and morphine. In the past, doctors rarely recommended opioids – synthetic opioids derived from opium – if they were not for major cancer pains or for the limits of death, as these drugs cause dependence. Besides doctors, the key to the Sackler, trained in marketing from a young age, has been to try to overcome the mistrust of the doctors.

And the epidemic spread through pharmacies.

The company Purdue tried to change the habits of doctors with the marketing campaign to market OxyContin. He bought famous experts to suggest from studies that the new drug not only alleviated the pains of many kinds, but did not produce addiction problems, but in previous studies the ability to dominate opioids was exaggerated.

Millions of patients would appreciate an improvement in the quality of life of OxyContini, but many others were so chained that even at dose and dose intervals there was strong withdrawal.

The launch of OxyContin soon revealed the alarming news, as in many places the bad uses of the medicine were multiplying. As doctors prayed more and more symptoms, some patients started selling their pills on the black market. The reverse was becoming more and more frequent when, having fallen into the hands of OxyContin, it was impossible to obtain it, other opiates, heroin were used.

Although by 2003 the Anti-Drug Agency DEA denounced that marketing with Purdu pharmacy was at the core of the new epidemic, there has been no way to stop the flood, both among patients and among doctors the link with the fashionable narcotic. In the calculations of the American Society of Medicine for Addictions, four out of five people who today use heroin started with painkillers administered by doctors.

And the killing continues. Today, 145 people die there from opioid overdoses, a total of 200,000 deaths in official estimates. Opiates account for 2.4 million Americans.

The opioid market changes constantemente.Segun has explained Maxime Robin of Le Monde Diplomatique, in recent years totally synthetic opiates, fentanyl and carfentanyl have predominated. Brought from China at a much cheaper price, because they are produced in laboratories without the need to sow or harvest any plant, they are much stronger than heroin or morphine itself: to say that three milligrams of Fentanyl are enough to kill a human being... Most of the latest cases of overdose refer to them, including Prince, singer, and, as his family has recently reported, Tom Petti, who started, not by chance, OxyContini, prescribed by the doctor.

In 2003, Barry Meier denounced the topic “Analgesic: The aftermath of addiction and the death of a ‘wonderful medicine’.” 15 years later, the OxyContin crisis is on everyone's lips in the United States, which is also going to have some response in Europe. It will not be the last, as the pharmaceutical industry continues with the same technique by creating and selling new drugs: if researchers and doctors bought by companies so recommend, citizens blindly accept the newest and most expensive remedies.