Dopesick

I’m in kind of a docudrama binge right now, and Dopesick is one of the better ones I remembered. So, after fondly dusting it off, I can say it is still excellent.

The opioid epidemic is a difficult topic to explain. Even after watching a long miniseries, it blows my mind how this was all able to come to pass. It is more understandable now, as the current President has spent the past year dismantling any semblance of federal oversight, but the level of semi-intentional government failure felt less obvious back in the 2000s. It’s just unconscionable that FDA regulators are allowed to work for pharma companies after they leave the FDA, because the consequences seem obvious. Which, spoiler alert, is what we got with the opioid epidemic, and then again with the financial crisis. End tangent.

Dopesick does a great job of showing how the Sackler family is responsible for the OxyContin crisis, and how the midlevel employees and salespeople were led along into participating in their devastating betrayal of public trust. We get to see the impacts on well-developed characters that are a blend of real stories. We also get to, thankfully, see some government agents working to deal with the abuse.

Not only is the show excellently written and acted, it accomplishes the goal of making viewers feel the outrage of how this epidemic came into existence and the ways in which it could all happen again. I give the show a 9 out of 10, as a few of the character stories mildly detract from my interest in the actual facts of the cases against Purdue Pharma.