Painkiller

This is a kick in the gut.

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Before the Sacklers combined lies-as-a-marketing-plan and the strongest opiates available, drug companies would focus on an ailment and then try to find a drug to treat it.

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But when the patriarch of the Sackler family died, his brothers were left with debt and a pharmaceutical company with a single drug that had been taken off the market in 1990 because it was known to be terribly addictive.

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The physician brothers and a marketing-savvy nephew reformulated that drug (ostensibly to make it slow-release and therefore, safe), and in 1996, they introduced OxyContin to the market, selling it directly to doctors using sexy, young women and, probably, kickbacks.

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It was revolutionary not only to be marketing drugs directly to doctors, it was also revolutionary to prescribe a drug that had previously only been used for end-of-life care for things like a toothache or a sprained ankle.

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The creators of this show must have workshopped storytelling techniques because they used several methods to tell this story.

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There was the narration of the DA investigator, played by Uzo Aduba. There were the parents breaking the 4th wall to preface an episode by saying that the overall telling of the story has been fictionalized but the information about the person that will be shown in the episode is the true story of their child's death.

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The story is also told from multiple perspectives: the Sacklers, the sales ladies, the doctors, the addicts, and the families of the addicts. We also get a bonus perspective given by the dead patriarch who shows up periodically for a chat with Richard Sackler, the new patriarch. Overall, the storytelling is excellent.

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The casting is pretty good. I loved Uzo in Orange is the New Black, but I think she over-did it a bit in this one because of the way her part was written. There was no need for the faux drama; all she had to do was tell the story. The three men chosen to play the living Sacklers, though, are perfect; perfectly wicked.

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You might say that litigation is ongoing, but you could also say that those motherfuckers got away with it.

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The series leaves a bad taste in the mouth because the Sacklers did, indeed, get away with it. Yes, they were ordered to pay 4.5B to their victims, but to the 500,000 families who lost someone, that means $9000/person!

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$9000 is what that person's life is worth in the eyes of the law. It is tragic. Worse, the Sacklers were allowed to pay the settlement over 9 years, so with tax loopholes, interest, and whatever else, this amount didn't even make a dent in the Sackler's wealth.

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This is hard to watch even though I didn't lose any friends or family to the opioid epidemic. I can't imagine how angry and upset this would have made me if I had.

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