Dopesick, review: the stench of corruption is rife in this effective telling of America's opioid crisis
The full title of the book on which new Disney+ drama Dopesick is based is called Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America. That’s three strands of the story of OxyContin, the opiod at the centre of America’s addiction epidemic, to which the TV adaptation adds a fourth, the investigators.
It’s Rick Mountcastle and Randy Ramseyer (a superb Peter Sarsgard and John Hoogenakker), the unpolished attorneys who set out to bring down Purdue Pharma from the ground up, who form the centre of the first three episodes. They’re the audience’s eyes as the scale of the scandal unfurls. Alongside Michael Keaton’s local doctor and Kaitlyn Dever’s small-town, soon-to-be-addicted young miner, they’re our route in to a chain of interconnected little people ripe for the crushing by the big company with the miracle drug. It is the individual, human stories played out in the long shadow of big pharma that make Dopesick so effective.
The villain of the piece is Purdue, a family owned, family run company at loggerheads with itself. Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) has a point to prove to his other Sackler cousins, having invested heavily in a new drug. As we begin, Sackler family meetings consist of dinners with lawyers present, the siblings so dysfunctional, distrusting and avaricious that they can only address one another at the table via legal counsel.
Set against that is the mining community of Finch Creek where family doctor Samuel Finnix (Keaton), is indeed like one of the family to all the locals. Through a series of cuts and time jumps Dopesick charts the fallout of big decisions made solely with an eye on sales, where people are mere lab rats with dollar signs on their backs. The doctors are the dealers and Purdue is the cartel. Purdue’s malignancy, the way one lie metastasizes in to another and research is spun and rewritten for commercial ends, is simply repugnant.
The challenge for writer Danny Strong is to keep what is a very complex story moving forward – Purdue is a hydra-headed beast; the fallout from boardroom decisions takes years; the DEA, the FDA, the FBI and several other acronyms that may be inscrutable to British audiences are all brought into play, though the stench of corruption is rife throughout. There’s a scene in which the Attorneys finally manage to subpoena documents from Purdue relating to a dodgy ad they created in the early '90s announcing OxyContin’s miraculous effects. Four trucks full of boxes of paper duly arrive, and at times Dopesick can feel similarly overwhelming.
But it also feels important that these stories be told, because part of Purdue’s wrongdoing was to ignore, then rebut, the stories that were coming back to them – of addiction to a drug they’d said didn’t cause addiction; of renewed pain that they said their magic pill would mitigate; of pharmacies getting broken into repeatedly by addicts asking to stop stocking the drug (Purdue threatened to sue them if they did). Lots of little lies accreted into one big one, and, as Dopesick shows in painful detail, it became a wrecking ball that devastated middle America.
