When Science Stops Asking Moral Questions

By Dr. Larry Smith
Author and recovery advocate based in Parksville, British Columbia

History rarely repeats itself in headlines, but it does echo quietly in systems.

In the late 20th century, Dr. Richard Sackler became the face of a medical transformation that promised compassion through chemistry. A physician by training, he never practiced medicine in the traditional sense. His genius wasn’t clinical — it was structural. He understood how to turn scientific credibility into commercial leverage.

Sackler’s rise at Purdue Pharma revealed a dangerous truth: that data, selectively curated, could be more persuasive than conscience. He mastered the art of medical messaging — using polished research, continuing-education programs, and marketing campaigns cloaked in empathy. The result was a revolution in pain management that, for a time, made him appear visionary. But it also unleashed an opioid crisis that redefined suffering for a generation.

The real tragedy wasn’t just one man’s ambition; it was the system that enabled it.

A system where credentials replaced character, and measurement replaced meaning.
Where questioning “the data” was seen as disloyal, and the human experience of addiction — messy, emotional, unquantifiable — was reduced to a spreadsheet entry.

We tell ourselves we’ve learned from those mistakes, yet our modern institutions still run on the same fuel: centralized authority, unified messaging, and a deep faith that science — or at least its metrics — will save us from ourselves.

Public health now operates like a command center. Statistics dictate policy. Models predict behaviour. The human being becomes a variable to be managed. And when someone raises a hand to ask, What about moral agency? What about human choice? they are quietly told the conversation is over.

But science without humility risks becoming ideology.
And once ideology controls medicine, compassion becomes compliance.

We see it today in how recovery is defined, how treatments are approved, and how dissent is framed as danger. The narrative is neat: trust the experts, follow the data, take the pill. What gets lost is the uncomfortable but essential question:

What are we healing for?

That question — or rather its disappearance — is what led me to write my novel, 2084: The Neuroxone Conspiracy.

In its pages, Dr. Ashcroft Stanton, a fictional descendant of Sackler’s world, perfects the formula. He understands how to make medicine sound like prophecy. His drug, Neuroxone, erases craving — and with it, the soul of recovery itself. It is a story about how good intentions, left unexamined, become instruments of control.

Fiction, of course, lets us exaggerate for effect.
But the warning isn’t fiction at all.

We are again at the edge of surrendering our autonomy to the next miracle molecule — one that promises safety, compliance, and comfort, but may cost us the moral depth that makes healing human.

Because when science stops asking moral questions, marketing answers them instead.

And when that happens, the cure starts to look a lot like the disease.