The cultural divide between America and Germany is apparently deep. This is the impression the men behind the pharmaceutical company Purdue have when it comes to the miniseries Dopesick goes. She recounts the genesis of the opioid epidemic in the USA that was triggered by the pain reliever OxyContin. This is said to have claimed around half a million deaths since the mid-1990s. While a new era of pain treatment was proclaimed in the USA under flimsy justifications, the group is grappling its teeth with the expansion to Germany. The approval of the supposedly harmless opioid, which has been available in the USA since 1996 and, thanks to willing doctors, was prescribed even for the smallest ailments, has been rejected by the German authorities.
This is a cultural thing, the Germans prefer to suffer, says one of the Purdue pullers. In the USA, OxyContin is already the most successful pain reliever of its kind, thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign according to which the opioid can only lead to addictive behavior in one percent of users. The statement is based on a study that does not even exist: The publication in a renowned specialist magazine turns out to be a five-line letter to the editor from a practicing doctor, who outlines impressions from his daily clinical routine. The drug has been in circulation for years.
Anyone who is skeptical is accused of a lack of empathy, pain is declared to be the “fifth vital sign”, which is now “checked” during medical examinations as well as blood pressure, cardiac sleep, breathing and body temperature. With a perfidious system of lies (fake studies and bought experts), rewards (pharmaceutical representatives receive bonuses for higher doses, doctors are invited to advanced training courses in luxury resorts) and intimidation (pharmacies are threatened with lawsuits if they no longer carry OxyContin because of robberies want) a nationwide sales network is created.
Dopesick is a revelatory thriller about the drug trade worth billions, only that the cartel does not operate in the dark here, but rather distributes its material with official approval by general practitioners and pharmacies, so that whole regions are addicted and cause thousands of drug deaths every year.
The series depicts this wave on several levels, based on Beth Macy’s 2018 non-fiction book, for which the journalist spoke to hundreds of victims and survivors of the opioid crisis. Alternating between various times from 1986 to 2021, it rolls Dopesick in eight one-hour episodes how Purdue Pharma turned the opioid into a blockbuster with a perfidious strategy.
The storyline combines the internal quarrels of the Sackler family with the efforts of the DEA investigators around Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard) and John Hoogenakker (Randy Ramseyer) with everyday life in a mining village in Virginia, where the resident doctor Dr. Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton) treated the numerous injuries to the population and initially reacted very cautiously to the promises made by the young pharmaceutical salesman Billy Cutler (Will Poulter) and his miracle drug. In an accident, he slips into addiction himself.
Unscrupulous pharmaceutical company
It’s one of the strengths of DopesickHow the series portrays how the pain reliever slowly seeps into this economically remote small town and continues to attract wider circles. But doubts about legal anesthesia are growing. Young people get the material on the black market, crime related to acquisitions is increasing. Purdue finally buys in a lobbyist who, with his steep thesis of “pseudo-addiction”, according to which addiction is only an expression of inadequately treated pain that can be eliminated with higher doses, provides the appropriate narrative against the growing doubts about OxyContin. In the course of the eight episodes, the tricks become more and more absurd. But the makers around creator Danny Strong and the three other directors, including Barry Levinson (Rain Man), stage the storylines with their well-researched backgrounds in a subtle and captivating way. It is a story about greed and mania for feasibility, inhuman exploitation and about the human tendency towards supposedly simple solutions.
The subject of pain runs through all layers, from the physical ruin of the miners to Finnex’s grief after his wife’s cancer death to finally Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) as the egomaniacal outsider of the family who doggedly tries to get through the success of his wonder drug legitimize, and actually believes, to be of service to all of humanity.
Against great resistance, the group was finally sentenced in 2007 to 600 million, one of the highest fines in the industry. But it is only one battle that is won, as the investigators bitterly sum up in the end, the war on drug trafficking continues. The last words belong to Dr. Finnix, who, after his own withdrawal, helps others not to numb pain, but to accept it as part of life, and learn from it to be more careful with himself and others. Of course, that’s not as easy as throwing pills.
Dopesick Danny Strong USA 2021, 8 episodes, Disney +
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