One day, I got a call from a Purdue insider who wanted to meet. We agreed to get together at a diner, located about midway between New York and Stamford, Connecticut, where Purdue was based. My source was nervous but dismayed by what Purdue was doing. Then, I was given a lined sheet of notebook paper. It had the word Toppers handwritten on it.

Purdue used the term, I was told, to identify its top-selling sales reps—the ones paid the biggest bonuses and awarded free vacations. There was a list of ten names, the geographic territories those reps covered, and the dollar amount of OxyContin they had sold in the previous three months. My source then explained a secret Purdue was guarding: every one of those locations contained thriving “pill mills” where doctors prescribed OxyContin for cash, often to people pretending to be patients in pain.

The area serviced by Purdue’s leading “topper” was Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and when I got back to the Times, I did some research. It turned out that the DEA had just shut down one pill mill there operating as a pain clinic. When I went to Purdue’s headquarters, its three top executives all claimed to me in an interview they didn’t know anything unusual was happening in Myrtle Beach. But thanks to my source, I knew that wasn’t true.

[This was the basis of the new Netflix series “Painkiller,” which has come highly recommended by a friend. This article makes a mention of Rush Limbaugh, whose courageous admission of addiction to Oxycontin helped fuel the pursuit of this story and the Purdue group that was selling it for all sorts of purposes beyond the extreme-pain management for which it was intended. — Ed]