10+ Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to be True

When OxyContin hit the market in 1996, sales reps told doctors the powerful painkiller was unlikely to cause addiction. But in small towns across America, families watched loved ones get hooked. They blamed the drug and the company selling it. Purdue Pharma blamed abusers.

Guilty pleas came in 2007, when Purdue admitted misleading people about how addictive OxyContin was, and again in 2020. By then, the opioid crisis it helped spark had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Purdue went bankrupt, and its owners, the Sackler family, faced fury.