Even as the pharmaceutical industry agrees to ever larger payouts to settle an onslaught of lawsuits over the opioid epidemic, it continues to obfuscate over its leading part in the conspiracy of greed that caused what the Trump commission, in its report on the crisis, called “this national nightmare.” Instead, Pharma’s PR operations and lawyers use manipulated statistics and make claims that the epidemic is “a complex problem with root causes that are difficult to disentangle” in an attempt to disperse responsibility so widely that, in the end, everyone is to blame and so no one is. 
