satisfy his curiosity of how many hospitalized patients became addicted to opiates grad student jane porter helped compile the statistics dr jacques rogge 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 for. those patients began to exhibit symptoms of tolerance and addiction to do former was quick to pacify fears we were often told that tolerance imply the diction but it doesn't tolerance just means

five-sentence letter to the editor published by two boston researchers, her shell gymnastic and jane porter, in 1980. >> the letter was about 100 words to the new england journal of medicine, and essentially it was a study of a small group of patients in a hospital setting, which suggested that if you were given opioids for the treatment of pain, there was a less than 1% chance of addiction. >> but the letter was never intended as a study. it applied only to patients in hospitals. nevertheless, some took the letter and ran with it. >> once that interpretation had been given, it then gets repeated without anybody really going back and looking at the original claim in the letter. and it gets cited time and time again in paper after paper. less than 100 words becomes the whole basis for claiming that opioids are safe for long-term treatment of chronic pain. >> purdue used the claim in its own public relations materials. >> the rate of addiction amongst pain patients who are treated by doctors is much less than 1%. they don't wear out. they go on working. they do not have serious medical side e