Kelsey Dougherty examines how the Hulu series Dopesick may have been late to the party with telling the story of the opioid crisis. While also depicting the tragic landscape the Sacklers' created.
How does something that started in 1996, became a problem in 1999, a legal situation in 2002, and declared an epidemic in 2017 not get talked about in mainstream media until 2021. Why are we just now talking about this issue? Dopesick premiered on Hulu on October 13, 2021, 25 years after opiate addiction was put into mass production. I understand the gesture of it all but the price tag has already been placed on these people's lives. What is the point of a call to action if it is too late to do anything?
Do we watch in hope that we will get a different ending? Do we watch to make ourselves feel better? we give ourselves a pat on the back saying well we at least acknowledge that this is an issue. Then we move on.
Dopesick was a term coined for what happens to addicts when they are withdrawing from opioids. Dopesick depicts the struggles of the innocent people who become addicted to Oxycontin. You see a doctor and his small town struggling to keep a hold of the life they once knew and two attorney generals trying to find a damning needle in an information haystack. You see these things along with the juxtaposition of the Sacklers sitting in their museum wings in serine silence while chaos ensues everywhere else.
There has been suffering long before Dopesick premiered. Enough suffering to have 760,000 deaths by 2021. If you are wondering how many deaths in a year have to occur for the government to care it is 70,239. It took until 2017 for the government to even declare that there was an epidemic. Starting in 1996 the number of deaths from drug overdoses has only grown exponentially. So how come it took 70,239 people to die for them to care. Dopesick shows Richard Sackler in his glass tower counting his money while death accumulates below, but they fail to show us the blind eye we turned as a society.
Jagged Little Pill
Richard Sackler and Purdue Pharma treated the marketing of Oxycontin in the 90s like it was Tickle me, Elmo. Instead of treating Oxycontin like what it was, which was a pain killer, they treated it like it was the new thing everyone needed in the 90s. It is uncommon for a pharmaceutical company to give out branded fishing hats, stuffed plush toys, and CDs. You may be thinking that no pharmaceutical company would give out branded merchandise to market their prescription opioid right? You would be wrong. This is exactly what Purdue Pharma did to advertise Oxycontin because who doesn’t need an Oxycontin fishing hat or a CD called “Get in the swing with Oxycontin.” No, you don’t?
Oxycontin Purdue called it a “miracle drug” it came to be known as “Pharmaceutical heroin.” Purdue Pharma says Oxycontin is non-addictive because of the special coating on the pill. This coating allows the opioid to dissolve over time allowing constant pain management. In contrast to other pain medications that are rapid release. Unfortunately, it did not work that way, unfortunate for the users of Oxycontin, not Purdue. Complaints circulate because of this but do not worry Purdue Pharma has your back. It is only a matter of breakthrough pain and it is very simple to fix this. Double the dose. That's right, double your dosage of Oxycontin. If you're taking 20 mg in the morning, well now you're taking 40 mg. You get hooked and Purdue lines their pockets. Who needs morals when you have money.
“Billion-dollar drug” short yet effective line said by Michael Stulhbarg in the Hulu series Dopesick. Stulhbarg portrays Richard Sackler in a manner that sends chills up your spine making every time he talks to feel like nails on a chalkboard. Richard Sackler is one of the most if not the most important characters to get correct. He is not only the antagonist of the show but also an antagonist of real people's lives. Nick Allen in his review of Hulu's Dopesick is a compelling, didactic look at the opioid epidemic says this about the character development of Sackler “complete with an almost cartoonish sadness, and the story's interest in following him around, of seeing the Purdue Pharma pushes come from his psychological need to prove himself to his family.” I believe that the show exhibits that the creation of Oxycontin was his attempt to gain respect while subsequently ruining people's lives. The people are just pawns in Purdue's messed-up game of chess while we are the spectators.
True Lies
Purdue decided to play the worst game of two truths and a lie with Oxycontin by telling no truths only lies and killing thousands of people in the process. The fourth episode of Dopesick is called “Pseudoaddiction” and it goes into one of the worst lies they told. Now patients are becoming addicted to Oxycontin. Wait what is that Purdue? you are saying it's not an addiction? it's actually pseudoaddiction. You say what really is happening is that they need to take more medication. What they feel are not withdrawals from not taking it but a lack of proper pain management so in turn, they need to take more Oxycontin. Makes complete sense. Right? It doesn’t? This is the moment when Purdue decided to collectively gaslight the whole country. Why wouldn’t you trust the company that created a highly addictive medication that was mass-marketed on a bed of lies to have your best interest at heart? The show displays the malice the Sacklers had when making the campaign that was sent to sales reps. The sales reps would go on to tell the doctors that there was nothing to worry about with oxycontin. This is when we realized the sales reps were just sheep on the world's worst farm. People are becoming addicts while we look in the other direction.
The third episode is called “Pain is the 5th vital sign.” This episode depicts the struggles of the two assistant attorney generals Rick Mountcastle and Randy Ramseyer. In their pursuit of Purdue Pharma, they find themselves facing one of the biggest issues, Purdue is a big corporate company. Courts are siding with Purdue and they Need to find info quickly. They get a break when they discover pamphlets with “pain is the 5th vital sign” on them realizing that this is the tactic that is making the doctors more comfortable with prescribing Oxycontin more than they would any other opiate. Could this be a result of economic medicalization? Medicalization is a social process where something that is not a medical issue is transformed into a medical issue. Economic medicalization is when the transformation is created because of a financial implication. The creation of the 1995 campaign “pain is the 5th vital sign” created a more relaxed approach to prescribing opioids. It created an issue that if doctors did not treat pain properly by prescribing a drug like Oxycontin they were not doing right by their patients and were considered inhumane. It is 2004 when the assistant attorney generals see this pamphlet. We should be questioning this. We should be talking about this. Yet we remain silent.
The 1%
Richard Sackler in 1996 found himself making a deal with the devil for financial glory using the lives of innocent people as a sacrifice. During this time Purdue said 1% of patients will get addicted. In 2022 760,000 people are dead from opioids. Turns out the 1% had nothing to do with getting addicted and everything to do with the Sacklers' reaching their goal of affluence. In Dopesick throughout the series, they show the users of Oxycontin losing their grip on their lives. You begin to see overdoses and the effects it is having on everyone in small towns. You see this the most with the character Besty Mallum especially toward the end of the show when she can’t get Oxycontin and instead tries Heroin. This is not an uncommon occurrence. 75% of heroin addicts used prescription opioids before turning to heroin. Is it the change from Oxycontin to heroin that shifts the conversation? There is a stereotype of heroin addicts that almost dehumanizes them, they get treated like criminals. The root of the issue was always right in front of us but we waited until 2021 to release a show on Hulu to tell us this.
Before Purdue Pharma lied their way into doctors prescribing opioids with reckless abandon, doctors only prescribed them if it was necessary. Doctors were concerned about prescribing opioids for fear of patients getting addicted. This had a term and it was called “opiophobia.” Before the release of Oxycontin prescriptions for opioids were only common for terminal cancer patients. This changed in 1996 with the release of Oxycontin, and as we know it snowballed from there. Between 1997 and 2002 the number of prescriptions rose from 670,000 to 6.2 million. Yes, Million. The most surprising part of it all was that they weren’t doing this in the dead of night, they were doing it in front of our eyes. We as a society managed to not see the deadliest drug deal. Purdue might be one of the most successful drug rings with revenue in the billions.
The situation that the Sacklers created is a real-life horror sorry. This gets emphasized in the review Michael Keaton's opioid drama 'Dopesick' is harrowing, horrifying, and a must-watch. Kelly Lawer addresses the horror-like feeling in the show “it isn't a horror film with CGI monsters; it's based on a true story where the monsters were hidden behind lawyers, inside innocuous-looking pill bottles, and in a disease, we didn't understand.”, she talks about watching scenes and wanting to yell at the tv. There is an ominous feeling like the dramatic irony trope in horror films when you know the killer is in the basement. This might be the only scenario where we should have gone into the basement. At the bottom of the stairs would be Richard Sackler counting his piles of money while 760,000 bottles of Oxycontin fall around you, then for one moment you look at Richard and he just smiles at you. Who knew a tiny white pill could be so horrifying.
The Time is Now
We find ourselves in a time of great information, almost too much if you ask me. Information is at our fingertips, in the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have that kind of information. We could not look things up in a matter of seconds. Purdue pharma did everything they could to bury any information of wrongdoing. In Dopesick you see the two assistant attorney generals Rick Mountcastle and Randy Ramseyer surrounded by boxes of information with hundreds of files in them. Did we as a society pretend the situation was not happening or did Purdue put us in a state of blissful ignorance? It is human nature to push away unfavorable information and look the other way. Maybe Dopesick was the wake-up call we needed, showing us this is what happened to small communities while we turned away. Is there really a right time to tell this story? Being aware of the situation might just be enough. We can not change the past but we have the chance to control the future. Dopesick gave us the opportunity to see where we fell short, the things we missed, the small towns that fell through the cracks. In a time where binge-watching is all too common, Dopesick may have taken the main stage when it needed to.
The Results are In
Dopesick was not the first show to bring the story of the Opioid epidemic and the Sackler's greed into the limelight of television. John Oliver on Last Week Tonight has
discussed this issue in detail. He has done three separate segments on the opioid crisis and the Sacklers starting in 2016. This is the first time I heard about it. This was 5 years before the show came out. It was also before a few pivotal things. It was before two of the cases started, one began in 2017 and the other in 2019. The book Dopesick came out in 2018. The documentary Crime of the Century came out in 2021. Why did this segment not get the reception the documentary and Dopesick got? Do we need Celebrities? He had Michael Keaton who plays Dr. Finnix in Dopesick on the show read parts of Richard Sacklers deposition where Richard said “I don’t know” over 100 times. This was before Keaton was cast in the show by the way. Did he not display the seriousness of the issue? In one segment he begins by calling prescription painkillers “the chemical cousin to heroin” which is not far off. Was it not entertaining? He makes a jab as Purdue’s Pseudoaddiction claims after discussing an article that called the epidemic a plague he retorts with “I’m sure Purdue would call it a pseudo plague.” Which is pretty on the nose if you ask me. Why did Crime of the Century get more of a reception? They are both on HBO. Did we only notice it because we had nothing better to do in the pandemic? John Oliver did three segments because he understood the levity of this situation he knew it was getting worse and not talked about enough. He went as far as to buy out a website the Sacklers made to prove their innocence in the situation www.judgeforyourselves.com. The information has been out there, we just keep looking away.
So what now? You have seen Dopesick at this point and feel as though something needs to be done. Well unfortunately the decisions have already been made and the penalties have been dealt out. There is a settlement for 6 billion dollars that is to help with the epidemic they created, but there is a catch to the settlement. The Sacklers are worth about 11 billion dollars that amount of money is but a pill dropped in a sea of Oxycontin. This is nothing to them. Along with barely a slap on the wrist, they are exempt from any and all civil cases in regards to Oxycontin forever. According to the New York Times “In return, Sackler family members would get the prize they insisted upon for nearly three years: an end to all current and future civil claims against them over the company’s prescription opioid business.” The only time we see any recent events is at the beginning of the last episode which shows Betsy’s mom at the 2019 Guggenheim protest. This protest began the conversation of the Sackler's name being present in art museums and what they should do about it. They ended up taking down their names. Surprisingly this will get to them because it hits them right where it hurts, in the ego. Maybe this was the spark that ignited the fire of the conversation that needed to be had about the Sacklers. In my opinion, the fire should have been lit in 1999. Three years before in 1996, Richard Sackler decided to play the most dangerous game with us against our will. He won.
Kelsey Dougherty currently lives in northern New Jersey and is a freshman studying media communications at Bloomfield College.
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