Manufacturers of prescription opioids offered assurance in the mid-to-late 1990s that these drugs wouldn’t make patients with pain into patients with substance use disorders. Some physicians believed them and prescribed these drugs without appropriate regard for their addictiveness, contributing to prescription and street opioid misuse that has reached alarming proportions. This issue considers ethical questions that contextualize the opioid epidemic from social, cultural, and policy-based perspectives and illuminates potential solutions.