Katherine Eban discusses her article “Oxycontin: Painful Medicine” in the November issue of Fortune magazine. Two decades ago opioid sales were a small fraction of today’s figures, bu in recent years, doctors have started prescribing these powerful painkillers more commonly, and addiction to them has skyrocketed. Eban looks at what the strange saga of Purdue Pharma—and its $3 billion drug, OxyContin— tells us about our national dependence on painkillers.