When news gets around that a quarter of all patients who use your most popular drug over the long-term develop an addiction, and an overdose epidemic claims more than 200,000 lives, it starts to eat into profits. So what’s a company like Purdue Pharma to do to make ends meet? The family behind the company decided to follow in the deadly footsteps of big tobacco. “As the United States takes steps to limit sales here, the company goes abroad.” The LA Times with a special report: OxyContin goes global.

+ “Distributors have fed their greed on human frailties and to criminal effect. There is no excuse and should be no forgiveness.” Other countries should pay close attention to the drug dealer’s playbook. Get doctors in a certain region to prescribe the drugs. Wait until people are hooked. And then unleash more and more drugs into that market in order to feed the beast. From the Charleston Gazette-Mail: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into West Virginia amid rise of overdoses.

+ Stat: 52 weeks, 52 faces: Obituaries narrate lives lost to the opioid epidemic.