"Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics" is the title of a letter to the editor written by Jane Porter and Hershel Jick and published in the January 10, 1980, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
The letter reported on an examination of medical files of patients who had been hospitalized and treated with small doses of opioids.
Its text read, in its entirety: Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively.
[1]The article has been cited extensively as evidence that addiction was very rare among patients who were prescribed narcotics (more specifically, opioids).
"[8] In addition, Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, trained its sales representatives to say that the risk of addiction among patients using the drug was less than 1 percent, citing Porter and Jick's letter as one of their sources.