It seems like a long, winding road from glossy television commercials hawking designer pharmaceuticals to the latest round of heroin overdoses in Butler County. It’s not.

It’s all part of the same cycle of greed, excess and eventual crashing-and-burning we’re used to associating with Wall Street and real estate bubbles, not pharmaceutical companies and opiate painkillers.

The former drove thousands of people into bankruptcy and homelessness starting in late 2007, ruining lives at a breakneck pace.

The latter continues to drive thousands of people into the clutches of a lethal and highly addictive drug, ruining lives at a breakneck pace.

The essential elements — runaway corporate greed, consumer excess and irresponsibility, and the eventual market correction — are the same.

So are the results. Only this time the “market correction” isn’t plunging home values and lost retirement funds; it’s plunging blood pressures and lost lives.

Painkillers have always had their place among treatment options. Today they are being prescribed too often by some doctors and marketed irresponsibly by some greedy pharmaceutical companies.

The latest episode, in which county authorities believe a “super strong” batch of locally-suped-up heroin is linked to at least two deaths and up to a dozen near-fatal overdoses in the last week, is another example of these consequences.

The wholesale greed of big pharma shouldn’t come as a surprise: recall last week’s outrage over the 5,000 percent price increase for Daraprim, a treatment used by people with AIDS or cancer.

But drug manufacturers have been feeding at the trough of opiate painkiller profits for more than a decade, promoting their use through dishonest marketing campaigns that have landed the companies in court and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2007, Purdue Pharma agreed to pay $635 million to settle criminal and civil charges that it underplayed the addictive properties of OxyContin, a powerful opiate painkiller, to doctors.

In 2014, Purdue and four more of the world’s largest narcotics manufacturers found themselves back in court again, the target of a California-based lawsuit that again accused them of a 20-year pattern of deceptive opiate marketing aimed at both patients and doctors.

Here are the results: from 1999 to 2013 the country’s rate of opioid overdose deaths nearly quadrupled, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Painkillers are now involved in more than 16,000 deaths each year.

That’s nothing compared to the rising rate of heroin overdoses, up 172 percent from 2010 to 2013 according to the Center.

And yet, when you turn on your television tonight, odds are you’ll once again be prompted to ask your doctor about this or that medication.

This time, be sure to remember exactly who’s pushing the drugs and what they stand for: profits no matter the cost to you.