patients became addicted to opioids grad student jane porter helped compile the statistics dr jack shroder house press secretary typed it up and submitted it to the new england journal of medicine. short letter was one of the many printed in january of 1980 the power graph simply stated the statistics and made no conclusion. what everybody was citing as evidence that we didn't have to worry about getting our patients addicted in some cases this was being described as a landmark study it was this one paragraph a letter to the editor this of course would tell you nothing about the risk of addiction when you put a patient on long term opioids but it turns out in fact they have always been just as addictive as we always knew they were there for many hundreds if not thousands of years when people used the obviously and in the early derivatives of opium. as patients began to exhibit symptoms of tolerance and addiction to do former was quick to pacify fears we were often taught that tolerance imply the diction but it doesn't tolerance just means that you may need to increase the dose of the drug to get