By: Lucas McClendon
Imagine if you will, seeing a woman asleep in their car. When you go to wake her up, the first thing she does is look up at you with a pair of glazed eyes and ask; “$50 for a blowjob. $100 if you want to fuck me,” only to drive off when you refuse and tell her to go to a hospital. This is a scene from the Hulu series Dopesick and is meant to be an accurate depiction of late 1900’s to early 2000’s America. Sadly even today sights like this aren't that rare, especially in places such as America.
Dopesick is an eight-episode series created by Danny Strong, which tells the story of how Purdue Pharma began selling their newest drug, an opioid by the name of Oxycontin, and the effects of their lack of morality as it devastated poorer American communities across the country. Dopesick’s portrayal of these corporations and their boundless greed is almost chillingly precise, and that's because it's only an interpretation of real-life events rather than a completely fictional story.
Dopesick’s focus on emulating what the real life events may have looked like rather than just creating drama allows it to surpass being an imitation and give us an accurate glimpse of the time period. One of the ways that it's able to accomplish this is through the cast of characters, as more than half of them are based on real people. From the rich Sackler family who owns Purdue Pharma, to the lawyers Rick Mountcastle and Randy Ramseyer who worked on the lawsuit against the company. The only fictional characters are the ones that inhabit a small mining town in Virginia, and even they are meant to work as a representation of the kinds of effects that Oxycontin would have on such a community. The series is essentially a look back on what each of these characters were doing during the opioid crisis in the early 2000s and why the situation suddenly worsened as it did.
Speaking of those fictional characters, their role in this series is just as important as those of the ‘real’ characters. Betsy Mallum, a young woman who works as a miner in the town where Dr. Finnix works, is one of such characters. Being a closeted lesbian in a small town was already immensely stressful to her, but once she suffered a serious injury while working in the mine then her stress multiplied tenfold. She is meant to represent the weak and vulnerable members of our society who would end up falling prey to any of the drugs polluting the streets, but the fact that oxycontin was a highly addictive drug that was prescribed by doctors made it all the more easier for them to be snatched up into its grasp. The last gut punch on the series happens with her death due to a heroin overdose, emulating the eventual demise that many drug addicts fall victim to every year.
As a result of the series' focus toward promoting its cruel reality, perspective becomes all the more important. As mentioned before there was the Sackler family as well as the lawyers Rick Mountcastle and Randy Ramseyer, but the series also focuses on the lives of Dr. Finnix, a doctor living in a mining town who went to prescribe oxycontin to his patients, Billy Cutler, a sales representative at Purdue Pharma, Bridget Meyer, an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and several more characters. What's important about seeing the perspectives of so many different characters is that we get to see how the events that take place in the series affect each of them. How much do the beneficiaries gain and what do they lose? How much do the victims lose from their actions and their own? Being an outsider to a tragedy such as the opioid epidemic makes it harder for many to sympathize with the victims or get angry at their abusers, but perspective allows us to view them through each of their own lenses and come to more well informed conclusions.
While Dopesick’s accuracy to real life is something that’s been praised by many viewers, but according to the article “What Hulu’s Star-Studded ‘Dopesick’ Gets Wrong About the Opioid Crisis.” by Tirhakah Love of the Daily Beast, states that the show has frequent inaccuracies in both the statistics that are used and the way that law enforcement are portrayed. Two of the points that he focuses on are how the rising crime rates that the show mentions was inaccurate to real life, and how the police focused more on profiteering off of the crisis rather than actually stopping the problem at its source. While inaccuracies like this lessen the staying power of a series such as this, it also allows us to more easily see and understand what, why and how everything was. In real life there was no agent Meyer who would heroically investigate the situation all on their own, but as a viewer it is much easier to follow the investigation of one character rather than a group, the same can be said about the inaccurate crime statistics. While there was no complete rise in rise during the period that Dopesick is supposed to take place (Violent crime rates in Kentucky were lower in 2001... than 1996”), it's much easier to understand the effect that the drug has on communities when the emphasis is placed on the rising rates of crime rather than a more dynamic spread of rates.
In conclusion, Dopesick leaves a lasting effect on how Americans look at the Opioid
Crisis. Even today the Opioid Crisis is still going strong, with tens of thousands of people dying every year from opioid-involved overdoses alone, but Dopesick isn't just another statistic or new report, it's an important in depth look into the causes and effects of a greedy companies actions toward profit. The ‘war on drugs’ isn't a battle that can be won by punishing the endless slew of buyers, but looking towards the sources of the situation: the makers and sellers of the drugs.
Lucas McClendon is a student living in Montclair, New Jersey and is studying Early Childhood Education at Bloomfield College.
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