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Lynn Webster had long been fascinated by pain. As a boy growing up in Nebraska, he’d watch his grandmother spend the day looking out the window of their farmhouse, unable to move more than a few inches at a time because of advanced multiple sclerosis.
When the pain got really bad, and his grandmother would writhe or scream out, pleading to God for relief, the young Webster would press her feet to the floor until the pain passed. It was a lesson he never forgot, taking it with him to his medical residency at the University of Utah, and within years it propelled him to the top of what appeared to be a remarkable new horizon in medicine: treating pain as a disease.
“The same type of thing you would have with a music scene, where you would have a lot of people interested in the same thing, happened in Salt Lake with pain medicine,” said Sam Quinones, author of "Dreamland," a book that explores the roots of the opioid epidemic. “There was a lot of collaborating between doctors, sometimes competing. A lot of them understood that they were looking for new ways of alleviating pain. They became great proponents in the opioid scene.”
[To read the full story go to DeseretNews.com](<http://www.ksl.com/ad_logger/ad_logger.php?location=https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900002328/the-untold-story-of-how-utah-doctors-and-big-pharma-helped-drive-the-national-opioid-epidemic.html&sponsor=The untold story of how Utah doctors and Big Pharma helped drive the national opioid epidemic>).
