A new report suggests that a mistake made by the Obama administration increased the deadliness of the opioid crisis.

According to The Daily Wire:

According to a new scientific paper, the Obama Administration made a mistake that deepened the opioid crisis and triggered the skyrocketing of deadly hepatitis C infections.

As the authors of the paper “A Transitioning Epidemic: How The Opioid Crisis Is Driving The Rise In Hepatitis C” suggest, Hepatitis C kills more Americans every year than any other infectious disease. The Washington Free Beacon adds, “Once infected, the virus can take ten to forty years to fully induce its effects; the results, however, are eventually deadly unless treated.”

Although the number of acute cases of Hepatitis C declined in the years before 2003, when the number of cases stabilized, the number started rising in 2010, apparently after the Obama Administration’s FDA permitted Purdue Pharma, the producers of Oxycontin, to reformulate the drug, which users had typically crushed in order to get the oxy needed for a more protracted high. The new version of the drug was offered in a version that left it useless after being crushed, which was thought an effective technique for reducing the deaths among people using it.

Instead, as the paper surmises, many of the former users of Oxyxcontin turned to inject themselves with heroin, leaving them vulnerable to getting Hepatitis C from unsanitized needles.

The paper comes to the conclusion that a crackdown on prescription drugs does nothing to stop the epidemic.