Highly addictive drugs aren't a thing you just start and stop taking... Opioids are intensely addictive and Purdue repeatedly marketed Oxycotin as a non-addictive Opioid, there is even video of a Sackler talking about how much the sales team should be pushing the non-addictive qualities[1] as a benefit when dealing with Doctors. They also used the ye olde drug rep hard sell sales tactics to push it on Doctors in exchange for monetary compensation and in kind compensation when the US made direct monetary compensation illegal.

Purdue is a huge part of this crisis, but they shouldn't be singled out - the marketing that pharma companies engage is constantly contributing to the ill health of Americans through toxicity, unnecessary side effects, stress from financial pressures and, sometimes, direct poisoning.

Please do a bit more research into this crisis and it's causes.

1. Specifically, false qualities that Purdue actively hide evidence of.

There is evidence that they knowingly lied to doctors and patients telling them that fentanyl was safe and less addictive than many other lesser opioids.

There is evidence that they knowingly increased pressure on sales even after it came to light that opioids were much more addictive and lethal than they thought.

There is also evidence that the sacklers were heavily involved in all of this.

I'd say yes, they definitely contributed to the epidemic in a large way.

Purdue also downplayed the addictiveness of new formulations in their advertising -to physicians-.

They also built disingenuous "self regulation" systems because they knew of the issue, and wanted to keep the wolves at bay, but the only thing the program was really designed to do was to shield Purdue. The very vast majority of over prescribing identified by this program was not reported to authorities until after the authorities had already acted (ie. when Purdue realized they would not lose any revenue from the report because the physician had already had his script writing ability pulled).