The Sacklers · The Murdaughs · The Zodiac
Kobek, Kitsch, and some literal wine-'n'-crime
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
OxyContin.
The story
Eve noted last week that she’d seen a lot of commentary on the superfluity of Painkiller, Netflix’s six-part series dramatizing Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family’s creation of/culpability in the opioid crisis. I would tend to agree, in theory, that we need “a quarterly take” on the subject “to remind everyone how dreadfully everyone, from drug companies to doctors to legislators to Walgreens, fucked up.”
In practice, while this is absolutely a fury worth inciting, I have seen Dopesick; I have READ Dopesick; I have read Gerald Posner’s Pharma; I have read the Patrick Radden Keefe New Yorker piece on which Painkiller is partly based; I have put in the infuriated time on the topic of pharmaceutical-industry fuckery (“phuckery”?). I just didn’t know how much more Big Pharma fuckery I could take, never mind how Painkillers performances could possibly rate alongside Dopesick’s.