The Great American Fraud

From the first paragraph on an expose on opioid addiction and the role of advertising:

GULLIBLE America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited by the skilfulest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade. Should the newspapers, the magazines and the medical journals refuse their pages to this class of advertisement, the patent medicine business in five years would be as scandalously historic as the South Sea Bubble, and the nation would be the richer not only in lives and money, but in drunkards and drug-fiends saved. 

 The article documents the complicit behavior of the medical profession and media with the producers of "opioid" drugs.   Nothing we haven't talked about in class this quarter, perhaps.  And yet, the series that this paragraph came from was first published in 1905.  Thoughts?