Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News. (Updated at 11:03 PM Seattle time.)
Although Webb emphasizes regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry and only points to some facts--like heroin production is booming in US occupied Afghanistan (before under the Taliban government it was banned) and that US troops guard their poppy patches--I think we will likely learn in the future that US government agencies actively colluded with criminal organizations to refine and especially distribute heroin, much of which ultimately ended up in the hands of Big Pharma and resulted in opiate addiction in the US.
I well remember from my days in the San Francisco Bay Area that the CIA was directly flying in heroin and other drugs from southeast Asia into Oakland using their Air America airline (see this, this, and this).
You may also be interested in an article entitled "Make Big Pharma Pay for the Opioid Crisis" by Karen Hicks posted on CounterPunch.