![]() ![]() Hotshot sales reps hawk Ox圜ontin by traveling the country and pitching small-town doctors and major hospitals, bearing gifts and toting pain charts and providing talking points.In the 1990s, Purdue executive Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg), obsessed with emerging from the long shadows of the family elders, pushes an all-out marketing campaign to sell Ox圜ontin based on the lie that fewer than 1% of patients would become addicted to the pills.“Have there been any spikes in crime related to it?” ![]() “You got anything on a prescription drug called Oxycontin?” she says to the unidentified source on the other end of the line. Based on Beth Macy’s powerful non-fiction book “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company That Addicted America,” this is a prestige project that aims for the rarefied stratosphere of feature films such as “Erin Brockovich” and “Spotlight” and “Dark Waters,” but despite the A-list cast and the high-level production values, the end result is curiously uninvolving, due to that start-and-stop timeline, not to mention far too many overwrought soap opera plot lines and some painfully obvious dialogue.Įarly on, there’s a scene in which Rosario Dawson’s DEA officer Bridget Meyer makes some calls to learn about this new drug on the streets. ![]() Unfortunately, that’s the case with the Hulu limited series “Dopesick,” which hops between multiple timelines to tell the story of how Purdue Pharma insidiously and systematically schemed to hook America on opioids, all in the name of raking in huge profits and with little concern for the devastating impacts on health, crime, the economy and the culture. New episodes premiere on subsequent Wednesdays. But in a country unable to provide basic healthcare for all, Macy still finds reason to hope - and signs of the spirit and tenacity necessary in those facing addiction to build a better future for themselves and their families.A miniseries premiering with the first three episodes Wednesday on Hulu. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows, astonishingly, that the only thing that unites Americans across geographic and class lines is opioid drug abuse. Through unsparing, yet deeply human portraits of the families and first responders struggling to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In some of the same distressed communities featured in her bestselling book Factory Man, the unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death. From the introduction of Ox圜ontin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched.īeginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question - why her only son died - and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. In this masterful work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |