Dopesick: Enraging and sombre streaming series about the opioid epidemic

Australia has its own opioid issues (a 2016 study found three-quarters of opioid deaths were attributable to pharmaceutical opioids), but it doesn’t even compare to the catastrophe in the US.

And Dopesick gets right to the heart of the rot, of how one pharmaceutical company changed the paradigm of treating pain with its so-called miracle drug OxyContin while lying about the likelihood of addiction in the pursuit of obscene profits and legacy.

Adapted and dramatised by Danny Strong from Beth Macy’s nonfiction book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America, the series features a sterling cast including Michael Keaton, Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg, Kaitlyn Dever, Rosario Dawson and Will Poulter.

It’s a sombre but enraging watch, a tapestry of how greed, hubris and deception created and drove an epidemic that has destroyed communities and shamed victims.

Dopesick is told through three intersecting story strands across several time periods.

The first is that of the Sackler family and their privately owned company, Purdue Pharma. Richard Sackler (Stuhlbarg) conceived OxyContin as a solution to fill a revenue gap created by the expiration of another patent.

Sackler’s sell was that OxyContin would be different to morphine or other opioids because it would have a slow-release system which prevents an instantaneous high, minimising abuse and addiction.

Purdue trained its sales staff, including Billy (Poulter), in the line that fewer than one per cent of users become addicted to OxyContin, which is obviously not true.

Billy then sells the virtues of OxyContin to small town doctors such as Dr Finnix (Keaton), who looks after a mining community in rural Virginia.

Dr Finnix’s patients are labourers in dangerous work, including young miner Betsy (Dever), who’s struggling with a back injury and her sexuality in a conservative family.

Purdue targeted Dr Finnix’s town and other mining, agricultural and farming communities precisely because of the nature of that hard work.

Which leads to the third story strand, that of the law enforcement agencies, including DEA agent Bridget (Dawson) and federal prosecutors Rick (Sarsgaard) and Randy (John Hoogenakker) who discerns a trend in the sharp rise of crime in those opioid-flooded communities.

By jumping between timelines, Dopesick draws direct connections between later revelations of a flawed approval process, deliberate obfuscations and outright deception with how OxyContin was rolled out, and the escalating damage it wreaked.

It’s an effective narrative structure that packs an emotional punch. Unfortunately, the time jumps are executed so clumsily it takes a couple of episodes to not even work it out, but to at least accept that you don’t always know what year it is.

Part of that is the unnecessarily complicated on-screen graphic marking a shift in time which scrolls from the year the story was in to the year it’s shifting to, and a lot of it is Dopesick does little to visually or tonally distinguish between eras.

It’s the same muted aesthetics and, admittedly, when you’re moving from the mid-90s to the early noughties, the fashions, hair and production designs don’t change much.

Other than of course the seemingly compulsory use of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” to designate the mid-90s.

Dopesick’s performances are stellar, which isn’t surprising when you gather talent such as Keaton, Stuhlbarg, Dever and Sarsgaard. You know they’re going to bring vulnerability, intensity and nuance – and they do.

Stuhlbarg is particularly interesting as Richard Sackler, one of the heirs of this philanthropic, baroque family driven by his desire for legacy.

There is a heaviness to Dopesick, but that weight is the physical, emotional and social pain inherent in this significant story.

Dopesick is on Disney+

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Originally published as Dopesick: Enraging and sombre streaming series about the opioid epidemic