There is a pretty good argument for saying that you have seen the new Netflix drama series Painkiller before. Disney+ drama Dopesick covered the same ground and many of its beats are familiar. Both are fictionalised accounts of real and composite people and events at the heart of the opioid epidemic unleashed by the Sackler family’s company’s invention and relentless marketing – from the late 90s onwards – of a new drug called OxyContin. Both weave the story of one “typical” individual’s gradual addiction to their prescribed medication (in Dopesick a young woman hurt in a mining accident, in Painkiller a 30-something family man called Glen, played by Taylor Kitsch, who is injured during his work as a mechanic) through the bigger legal picture, presented through similar framing devices. Dopesick had Michael Keaton as a doctor testifying at a court hearing about OxyContin’s effect on him, his patients and their community. Painkiller has Uzo Aduba as Edie Flowers, an investigator with a US attorney’s office in Virginia – home to plenty of the kind of rural, working class and economically deprived communities that were the prime targets for the pushers of the new product. “People,” as Flowers puts it, “in pain and with no option but to get better.”
She is one of the first to spot the pattern of overprescription and abuse of the drug. Her explanation of the crisis to a law firm about to start a mass civil claim against Purdue Pharma – the company making OxyContin and owned by the Sacklers – roots us in the present and sparks flashbacks to pivotal points in the drug’s awful story.
