Dopesick bounces around from 1996, when Purdue put Ox圜ontin on the market, through two federal investigations into the drug’s effect on society that unfold over the course of a decade. Strong becomes the latest prestige-TV creator to fall in love with nonlinear storytelling to his own detriment. Individual episodes feel too long, and Dopesick as a whole seems to have no business lasting eight-plus hours, repeating various logistical and thematic details again and again with diminished effectiveness each time. In isolated moments, the miniseries functions exactly as prescribed, offering a devastating portrait of how Purdue helped turn us into, as DEA agent Bridget Meyer (Rosario Dawson) puts it, “a pill-popping zombie nation.” More often, though, the drama’s emotional impact fades too quickly, and chief writer and producer Danny Strong ( E mpire) attempts to compensate by doubling the dosage. This is, unfortunately, the narrative philosophy of Dopesick itself. Neither claim proved true, a fact that Sackler and his underlings tried to conceal by insisting that the drug’s failures were actually signs of patients suffering “breakthrough pain.” The only treatment for that condition, they said? You guessed it - even more Ox圜ontin, which only decreased the medication’s effectiveness and increased its addictive qualities, on and on, until whole communities were being destroyed. Pharma execs and sales reps insisted that the painkiller was both nonaddictive and long-lasting. Given the size of its canvas, Dopesick is a remarkable achievement, which clearly lays out the facts of the slow-burning tragedy, with lots of helpful date reminders, without losing track of the human stories behind it.The new Hulu limited series Dopesick adapts Beth Macy’s investigative bestseller about the causes of the opioid epidemic - and, specifically, the role that the family-run Purdue Pharma company and its chairman, Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) played in getting America hooked on Ox圜ontin. It aims to explore the scandal from the Sacklers down, opening with the development of the drug in the 1980s, to show how greedy bosses and avaricious sales reps were able to hijack the good intentions of doctors all over the country. The eight-part miniseries Dopesick, adapted by the Empire co-creator Danny Strong from a book of the same name, is more ambitious than that. How can something so sprawling be rendered on the small screen? A conventional approach would be to turn it into a courtroom drama or a detective-style investigation. Millions of lives lie ruined in the drug’s wake. Within a few years it was obvious Oxycontin was causing an uptick in crime and a wave of desperate addicts, but even now, a quarter of a century later, the recriminations are playing out in American courts. Beginning with industrial mining and logging towns, where chronic pain from injuries was more common, the drug spread out across the country. Starting in the mid-1990s, Purdue, owned by the Sackler Family, set about making their new “slow release” opioid the most popular pain relief drug in the US, claiming that it was less addictive than other drugs in the same class. Few subjects are more worthy of representation than America’s epidemic of opioid addiction, driven by Purdue Pharma’s drug Oxycontin. A deserving subject is not always the same thing as a good drama.
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