What We’re Watching: “Dopesick”
We recently finished watching the eight episode series “Dopesick,” a docudrama about the opioid crisis that began in the mid 1990s. It was responsible for the deaths of more than 500,000 people and millions of other lives were devastated. The series is based on Beth Macy’s book “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America.” The term “Dopesick” refers to OxyContin’s effect on the brain when users come to believe they’ll die without more of the drug.
Out of concern for revealing spoilers, I’ll only say that this is a chilling, vital, must-watch, conspiracy thriller with loathsome villains, passionately outraged attorneys, grieving families, inhumane greed, bought-off government employees, compulsive immorality and justice delayed. Michael Keaton is the moral lodestar and won an Emmy for Best Leading Actor. He plays Dr. Samuel Finnix, a physician who toils in Finch Creek, a former mining community in Appalachia and through his interactions with patients slowly begins to grasp the enormity of the crisis. He also becomes addicted to OxyContin.
It’s a compelling indictment of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, the moral monsters responsible for the opioid epidemic. Richard Sackler (net worth $1 billion), who invented OxyContin and promoted it, has never spent a day in prison and when asked at a hearing whether he was responsible for the opioid epidemic, he simply resplied: “No.” For some reason I found myself thinking of Luigi Mangione’s offing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. (Eight episodes, Hulu)