In his book Dreamland, journalist Sam Quinones points to one paragraph of false information that helped pave the way for the surge in addicts to the highly addictive opiate OxyContin. Before 1980, the rule for prescribing narcotic painkillers was as little as possible for as short a time as possible. Doctors were taught that the risk of addiction was simply too high. As Mr. Quinones recounts, this thinking changed when Dr. Hershel Jick and a colleague submitted a one-paragraph letter to the New England Journal of Medicine noting that, according to their data, of 12,000 patients treated with opiates in a Boston hospital before 1979, "only four had grown addicted."

But Quinones writes, "There were no data about how often, how long, or at what dose these patients were given opiates. The paragraph simply cited the numbers and made no claim beyond that."

Cited and recited, Dr. Jick's letter bolstered a growing push within medicine to treat pain more aggressively. By the time the pharmaceutical company Purdue Frederick introduced a time-release painkiller called OxyContin in 1996, the accepted wisdom was that opiates were nearly non-addictive. Purdue "set about promoting OxyContin as virtually risk-free and a solution to the problems patients presented doctors with every day," Doctors—often primary-care physicians not specially trained in pain management—duly began to prescribe the drug for patients in chronic pain.

The results have been disastrous. "Oxy prescriptions for chronic pain rose from 670,000 in 1997 to 6.2 million in 2002," writes Mr. Quinones. "While still prescribed for cancer pain, OxyContin was now also offered for the sorts of aches for which one might have previously taken an aspirin." As a result, the rates of opiate addiction in big and small cities across America have soared.