In 1999, America had fewer than 10,000 deaths related to opioid addiction. In 2021, it had more than 80,000. This rampant rise has been labelled the “opioid epidemic”, a crisis affecting predominantly poor, rural communities, where manual labourers have been hooked on prescription drugs, issued by overzealous doctors working on commission. And within this black-market pharmacy, there is one pill that has come to define the era: OxyContin, a slow-release form of oxycodone. Painkiller, a new Netflix six-parter, charts the rise of Oxy – and the fall of America.
At the heart of the story is the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, whose name adorned cultural institutions from the National Gallery to Oxford University, and its symbolic head: Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick). But this isn’t the story of how the Sacklers arrived in America, as Jewish immigrants at the start of the 20th century. Instead, we pick up the history as prosecutors swirl. Low-level bureaucrat Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba) is brought in by the prosecuting team, who have already deposed Richard, to lecture on the history of the Sackler dynasty, their control of Purdue Pharma and the rise of OxyContin. A composite character, her purpose is to explain the threads of the narrative: the family who built the drug, the doctors and sales reps who peddled the panacea, and the patients who, through malpractice, become victims.
