Big Pharma in the US riding on the backs of criminally compliant prescribing physicians along with the drug cartels in South America have wreaked unimaginable havoc on American lives.
Here, Al Jazeera in a weekend read has opened up a can of worms: For years, the American opioid crisis was too big, and too complicated, to see in its entirety. There was the view from communities where people fatally overdosed every day on OxyContin, a highly addictive (and highly profitable) pharmaceutical opioid. There was the view from the Food and Drug Administration, where top officials allowed Purdue Pharma to falsely claim that the product was safe. There was the view from law enforcement, which struggled to build durable cases against the billionaire-owned company. And finally, there was the view from the Purdue C-suite, where members of the Sackler family – the company’s breathtakingly unscrupulous owners – pushed employees to overprescribe their deadly drug while hiding its dangers. It wasn’t until around 2018, when a spate of lawsuits were unveiled against Purdue, that all these perspectives came together. This appalling intersection is the terrain covered by Dopesick, an ambitious and exquisitely acted eight-part TV series on Hulu that spans the late 1990s to 2019. Based on Beth Macy’s book of the same name, it has a star-studded cast. One of the breakout stars is Kaitlyn Dever, who plays a young queer West Virginia coal miner who goes from a “legitimate pain patient” to a full-blown addict. The distinction between “pain patient” and “addict” is key both to the series and, one realizes while watching the show, to Purdue’s strategy of avoiding litigation. Purdue Pharma revolutionized the field of medical advertising in the 1970s by identifying new “problems” that only its drugs could treat. Two decades later, the company was hiring pay-for-play doctors to endorse made-up conditions like “breakthrough pain” and “pseudoaddiction” to legitimize the overprescription of OxyContin. When reports of the drug’s devastating effects became too loud to ignore, the company blamed so-called abusers. Real pain patients, Purdue claimed, just couldn’t get addicted. As Dopesick documents, the company was full of dirty marketing tricks. For example, Purdue: instructed reps to wine and dine doctors and bribe receptionists. tied bonuses to pharmaceutical sales and offered top-selling reps trips to the Caribbean. dumped millions into shell companies and pseudoscientific studies and conferences, seeking to redefine pain as something that could be “managed” for life (with the help of Oxy, of course). deliberately rolled out the drug in southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky and rural Maine – areas oriented around coal mining, farming, logging and "places where people get injured doing labor-intensive jobs." Within a few years, crime rates spiked and so-called pill mills were everywhere. did some strategic hiring, including Rudy Giuliani as a political lobbyist, an FDA official that vetted OxyContin and an attorney general who had campaigned against the drug. Although the series gets lumpy when it tries to cram all this corruption in, the characters in Dopesick are rendered with intimacy and depth (minus the Sacklers, whose extreme wealth and emotional chilliness come off as cartoonish). Michael Keaton embodies the contradictions and torment of a well-meaning doctor who realizes he has been poisoning those in his care before becoming an addict himself. Ray McKinnon and Diane Mallum, playing the conservative religious parents of the teenage coal miner, are heartbreaking in their efforts to save her from the drug that has robbed her of her will to live. The larger story, of course, isn’t over. Purdue Pharma declared bankruptcy last year, and so did the Sacklers (though a judge recently overturned a ruling that protected them from individual liability). Meanwhile, the opioid crisis has morphed and worsened, with the gap left by the pharmaceutical companies now filled by Mexican cartels. Fueled by the pandemic, opioid-related overdoses increased by more than 28% last year, hitting an all-time high of over 100,000. In many ways, this is a very American crisis – one that would have never been possible without the revolving door between industry and government, and the overwhelming power of corporate money. The conditions that first made this situation possible have, if anything, gotten worse since OxyContin first hit the market. At least now we’re all paying attention. — Jessica Loudis Roland. Toronto.
