[raphlinus]

It is true. The claim was that the risk of addiction was extremely small. One of the ways this idea was pushed was cherry-picking a study that showed no addiction among 10k burn victims treated with opioids. Minimizing the risk of addiction was also a major component of the guilty plea and fine.

Obviously any reasonable person with a knowledge of opioids could see that these claims were BS, but it's remarkable what motivated reasoning can do, especially when there's profit involved.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/

[okareaman]

> The opioid epidemic was largely caused by the idea of them being non addictive

the parent comment said "non addictive" which I said wasn't true. You said

> The claim was that the risk of addiction was extremely small

which is another way of saying they thought they could manage addiction that did occur. They thought this because they had a time-release pill which made the risk of problematic addiction "extremely small" as you say