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What is true of the US can also be true of any country in the world. Greed is the same everywhere, and big pharma companies would compromise on the health and safety of patients, if it led to profit for them.
Painkiller (on Netflix), created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster and directed by Peter Berg is a fictionalised account of how the Sackler Family that owned Purdue Pharma, was responsible for the opioid crisis in the US. They pushed into the market the painkilling drug OxyContin, which turned out to be addictive and dangerous for patients.
Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba) is a federal investigator who follows the trail of how OxyContin reached the hands of patients, who needed pain relief after injury or cancer. If Purdue Pharma’s Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick) is unscrupulous, the doctors who buy into the lies peddled by the company’s brochures are equally culpable. They send pretty young sales representatives, like the tough marketer Britt (Dina Shihabi) and bright-eyed Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny) to charm doctors into prescribing the drug.
A composite of the many patients is tyre shop owner Glen (Taylor Kitsch), whose painful back injury is treated with OxyContin, till the addiction and other horrific side effects kick in. Oxy was an effective pain reliever, meant to be taken once in 12 hours, but the effects of the drug wore off quicker, leading to patients taking larger doses than were safe, and growing dependent on it.
The six-part series that blends documentary style fact-ticking with emotional drama—each episode opens with a person talking of losing a loved one to Oxy addiction—is scarier than a horror movie, because it shows how easy it is for a powerful businesses to twist the regulatory bodies and get a drug passed without proper checks. It is also equally shocking that money can smoothen the legal hassles that crop up and the wealthy perpetrators get away with no jail time, and just generous settlements to make the problem go away.
Apart from the uncompromising Edie, the Sacklers run into a roadblock—an honest FDA (Food and Drug Administration) inspector Dr Curtis Wright (Noah Harpster), who does not automatically take the Sacklers’ word for it about fewer than 0.3 percent of patients showing signs of abusing the drug. “But were you looking for signs of abuse?” Wright asks, aware of the dangers of heroin in pill form, which is what OxyContin is.Richard is desperate to get FDA approval, because without it, the company is in financial trouble. Eventually, every man has his price and Dr Wright is bought over and rewarded with a consultancy job at Purdue.
The easy availability of OxyContin inevitably led to pill mills and a black market in Oxy pills, because drug addicts used it for the high it provided, by powdering and snorting the medicine.
Painkiller, inspired by Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article, The Family That Built An Empire of Pain and the 2021 novel of the same name, is the latest in the line of screen projects that expose the medical mafia, like Dopesick, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed and Crime Of The Century.
How factual the series is and how much of it is dramatic license could be up for debate, but as a work of drama, it is engaging and thought-provoking.
Painkiller
Directed by Peter Berg
Cast: Matthew Broderick, Uzo Aduba, Taylor Kitsch and others
On Netflix
