I worked in a pain management clinic in the 2000s. The drug reps came daily, would have lunch catered from every restaurant, would go golfing with the docs and take them out for expensive dinners, and would bring branded gifts. They couldn’t force the docs to prescribe their particular pill but they would stop coming if you weren’t pushing enough of their product. It was sort of an unspoken agreement that they wrote the scripts and the reps would keep showing up.

It’s kind of crazy looking back. We were one of the clinics that took the enormous responsibility seriously and tried to serve the community and I think we did genuinely help people that were suffering. But I think that we were ultimately naive as shit about the drugs we were pushing and there’s no doubt many of those patients we had probably would go on to struggle with addiction problems.