Editor's note: Part 1 in a two-part series about the opioid crisis.

The makers of prescription painkillers have adopted a 50-state strategy that includes hundreds of lobbyists and millions in campaign contributions to help kill or weaken measures aimed at stemming the tide of prescription opioids, the drugs at the heart of a crisis that has cost 165,000 Americans their lives and pushed countless more to crippling addiction.The drugmakers vow they're combating the addiction epidemic, but The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity found that they often employ a statehouse playbook of delay and defend that includes funding advocacy groups that use the veneer of independence to fight limits on the drugs, such as OxyContin, Vicodin and fentanyl, the narcotic linked to Prince's death.The mother of Cameron Weiss was no match for the industry's high-powered lobbyists when she plunged into the corridors of New Mexico's Legislature, crusading for a measure she fervently believed would have saved her son's life.Painkillers just the startIt was a heroin overdose that eventually killed Cameron, not long before he would have turned 19. But his slippery descent to death started a few years earlier, when a hospital sent him home with a bottle of Percocet after he broke his collarbone in wrestling practice.Jennifer Weiss-Burke pushed for a bill limiting initial prescriptions of opioid painkillers for acute pain to seven days. The bill exempted people with chronic pain, but opponents still fought back, with lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry quietly mobilizing in increased numbers to quash the measure.They didn't speak up in legislative hearings. "They were going individually talking to senators and representatives one-on-one," Weiss-Burke said.Unknowingly, she had taken on a political powerhouse that spent more than $880 million nationwide on lobbying and campaign contributions from 2006 through 2015 - more than 200 times what those advocating for stricter policies spent and more than eight times what the formidable gun lobby recorded for similar activities during that same period.The pharmaceutical companies and allied groups have a number of legislative interests in addition to opioids that account for a portion of their political activity, but their steady presence in state capitals means they're poised to jump in quickly on any debate that affects them.Collectively, the AP and the Center for Public Integrity found, the drugmakers and allied advocacy groups employed an annual average of 1,350 lobbyists in legislative hubs from 2006 through 2015, when opioids' addictive nature came under increasing scrutiny."The opioid lobby has been doing everything it can to preserve the status quo of aggressive prescribing," said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing and an outspoken advocate for opioid reform. "They are reaping enormous profits from aggressive prescribing."The drug companies say they are committed to solving the problems linked to their painkillers. Major opioid-makers have launched initiatives to, among other things, encourage more cautious prescribing, allow states to share databases of prescriptions and help stop drug dealers from obtaining pills.And the industry and its allies have not been alone in fighting restrictions on opioids. Powerful doctors' groups are part of the fight in several states, arguing that lawmakers should not tell them how to practice medicine.Bills introducedHundreds of opioid-related bills have been introduced at the state level just in the last several years. The few groups pleading for tighter prescription restrictions are mostly fledgling mom-and-pop organizations formed by families of young people killed by opioids. Together, they spent about $4 million nationwide at the state and federal level on political contributions and lobbying from 2006 through 2015 and employed an average of eight state lobbyists each year.Prescription opioids are the synthetic cousins of heroin and morphine, prescribed to relieve pain. Sales of the drugs have boomed - quadrupling from 1999 to 2010 - and overdose deaths rose just as fast, totaling 165,000 this millennium. Last year, 227 million opioid prescriptions were doled out in the U.S., enough to hand a bottle of pills to nine out of every 10 American adults.One of the chief solutions the drugmakers actively promote now are new formulations that make their products harder to crush or dissolve, thwarting abusers who want to snort or inject painkillers. But the new versions also extend the life of their profits with fresh patents, and some experts question their overall effectiveness.Focus on pain treatmentAn analysis of state records collected by the National Institute on Money in State Politics provides a snapshot of the drugmakers' battles to limit opioids. For instance, they show that pharmaceutical companies and their allies ramped up their lobbying and campaign contributions in New Mexico in 2012 as lawmakers considered - and ultimately killed - the bill backed by Cameron Weiss' mother.But one of the drug companies' most powerful engines of political might isn't part of the public record - a largely unknown network of opioid-friendly nonprofits they help fund and meet with monthly known as the Pain Care Forum, formed more than a decade ago.Combined, its participants contributed more than $24 million to 7,100 candidates for state-level offices from 2006 through 2015, with the largest amounts going to governors and the lawmakers who control legislative agendas, such as house speakers, senate presidents and health committee chairs.They've gotten involved in nitty-gritty fights even beyond legislatures. After Washington state leaders drafted the nation's first set of medical guidelines urging doctors not to prescribe high doses of opioids in 2007, the Pain Care Forum hired a public relations firm to convince the state medical board that the guidelines would hurt patients with chronic pain.Many patients vouch that opioids have given them a better quality of life."There's such a hysteria going on" about those who have died from overdoses, said Barby Ingle, president of the International Pain Foundation, which receives pharmaceutical company funding. "There are millions who are living a better life who are on the medications long term."That's contrary to what researchers are increasingly saying, however. Studies have shown weak or no evidence that opioids are effective ways to treat routine chronic pain. And one 2015 study from a hospital system in Pennsylvania found about 40 percent of chronic non-cancer pain patients receiving opioids had some signs of addiction and 4 percent had serious problems."You can create an awful lot of harm with seven days of opioid therapy," said Dr. David Juurlink, a toxicology expert at the University of Toronto. "You can send people down the pathway to addiction, when they never would have been sent there otherwise."Liz Essley Whyte and Ben Wieder contributed to this report.Tuesday: A look at Pennsylvania and what's next.