Netflix's 'Painkiller' deep

The Netflix original drama series “Painkiller,” created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, is six-part series based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and Barry Meier’s “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic.” The show examines the origins of the opioid crisis, with a focus on Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, owned by Richard Sackler and his family. The Sacklers have been dubbed the “most evil family in America,” as well as “the worst drug dealers in history.”

The series, starring Uzo Aduba and Matthew Broderick, is about the opioid epidemic’s rise in America.

Aduba plays Edie Flowers, the series’ moral compass. Despite the fact that she is a fabricated character, she is based on real-life prosecutors who sought justice for devastated families and communities throughout the crisis. Richard Stephen Sackler, an American billionaire businessman and physician who was the chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, is played by Broderick. As president, he allowed specific marketing techniques to encourage OxyContin sales to doctors, pharmacists, nurses, academics, and others. He was aware that keeping patients on high OxyContin doses for extended periods of time raised the risk of major adverse effects, including addiction. It’s this indifference to patient care in the name of profit that is examined in the series.

Executive producer Eric Newman and consultant Barry Meier talked about what inspired them to make the series as the country is finally tackling this important and ever-present topic.

Meier, a former New York Times journalist, wrote the book that revealed the origins of the opioid epidemic and the shadowy world of Purdue Pharma’s Sackler family.

“I was drawn to it as a reporter in 2001, in large part because at that point it was a very different drug addiction story,” Meier explains. “It was a story about addiction being caused by the pharmaceutical industry, by the legal manufactures. It was a story about how an epidemic of drug abuse wasn’t being created by a criminal entity, but by prescriptions written by doctors. Often, well meaning doctors who didn’t realize this drug that was being promoted to them as safe from abuse and unlikely to cause addiction, was going to cause a tidal wave of abuse.”

Newman was drawn to the concept by two factors: first, Meier’s book, and second, the fact that a firm like Purdue Pharma could lawfully manipulate the market and induce such widespread addiction.

“To be able to join Barry in what has been a two-decade quest to get this story as widely disseminated as possible,” Newman shares, emphasizing how “this is a massive betrayal of public trust. This is a medical conspiracy that killed a lot of people and created for us as storytellers an opportunity to tell a story about victimization that is not similar to other drug epidemics in this country.”

Newman emphasizes something that many have mentioned while discussing how the debate has gone regarding the opioid crisis versus the crack epidemic.

“What this means is that there are two systems of justice: justice for the very wealthy and justice for everyone else,” he shared. “There is a version in which the criminals sail off into the sunset on mounds of money with no repercussions. The message is that if you have enough money, you can get away with it, and if you look at something, we were very explicit about drawing a parallel between the opioid problem and the crack epidemic in the mid 1980s; it’s the same deal only we’re not imprisoning people and we’re still blaming the victims once again.”

The one thing that both addictions have in common is that they are being treated as a law and order issue rather than a healthcare issue. Having not learned or refusing to recognize addiction as a health issue that requires treatment rather than jail.

The “Painkiller” is a difficult series to watch, but Newman and Meier want viewers to be uncomfortable because their discomfort is nothing compared to the loss that families have suffered as a result of this lethal drug, and they hope that it inspires them to hold elected officials accountable for how medication is pushed through the system.

All episodes of “Painkiller” are currently available to stream on Netflix.

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