THERE'S A MOMENT in the Hulu miniseries Dopesick in which a Drug Enforcement Administration officer walks into her supervisor’s office to talk about the wave of opioid addiction that was, in the early 2000s, already rampant in central Appalachia. Earlier she’d been told that the higher-ups weren’t interested in “pill mill” doctors and pharmacy burglaries. They wanted to go after the cartel. Well, says Agent Bridget Meyer (played by Rosario Dawson), she’s found the cartel—and proceeds to recite the Stamford, Conn., address of Purdue Pharma Inc.
Over the past few years, documents uncovered in various lawsuits have made it clear that Purdue Pharma, privately owned by members of the Sackler family, was “the cartel” behind a plague of addiction and overdose that has so far killed more than a half-million Americans. And the kingpin of this cartel was Purdue’s Richard Sackler, former company president and co-chair of the board of directors.
In 1996, Sackler conceived an ambition to cure the world of chronic pain—and multiply the family fortune—with the “miracle drug” OxyContin, a powerful time-released painkiller. Sackler hired an army of attractive young sales reps and aimed them at small-town doctors in parts of the country with lots of painful workplace injuries from things like logging and coal mining. Misery, dependency, and death followed as the drug spread unchecked like wildfire for an entire decade.
In 2007, Purdue Pharma and a couple of its executives pleaded guilty to lying about OxyContin’s addictiveness and abuse potential, then got a slap on the wrist. That 2007 case is one narrative strand of Dopesick’s epic tapestry. The work of the DEA agent previously mentioned provides another. But the most affecting by far is the one that unfolds in a tiny southwest Virginia coal town.
There we see family doctor Samuel Finnix (played by Michael Keaton), who’s spent 40 years trying to ease his patients’ hurts. He’s low-hanging fruit for a Purdue Pharma salesman who promises that less than one percent of OxyContin users become addicted. We see Finnix slowly but surely surrender to OxyContin’s false promises and become complicit in the devastation of the community he loves.
In 2010, Purdue Pharma released a new version of OxyContin that could not be crushed for easy snorting or injection. But by then there were hundreds of thousands of dopesick Americans facing agonizing opioid withdrawal symptoms. And Mexican drug cartels were there to take up the slack with cheap and abundant heroin. That part of the story is far from finished. 2020 was the worst year yet for drug overdose deaths (more than 93,000, most from opioids).
At the time of this writing, Purdue Pharma had reached a financial settlement of the OxyContin claims against it, which requires the company, and members of the Sackler family, to lay out billions of dollars to beginrepairing the damage of the past 25 years. However, the settlement allows the company to continue to operate. It also lets the Sacklers keep much of their ill-gotten gains and immunizes them from future lawsuits.
Today Richard Sackler lives, with his money and his immunity, in a hilltop mansion outside Austin, Texas. Meanwhile, one of his professional peers, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, kingpin of the Sinaloa drug cartel, is doing “life plus 30 years” in a U.S. maximum security prison.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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