In a bright room on a suburban US college campus, a group of students are watching gleefully as a speaker promises a “glorious, beautiful revolution”. The speaker, a young sales representative for Purdue Pharma, is outlining a vision of “life transformation”: a blueprint for healing America’s physical and spiritual ills. This is not a religious gathering, nor a political rally. It is the launch of OxyContin: a small white pill that will go on to decimate hundreds of thousands of American lives.
Netflix’s new drama Painkiller, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, tells the story of how Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick) took advantage of a broken healthcare system to build a vast pharmaceutical empire through their company Purdue Pharma.
OxyContin’s active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin which is up to twice as powerful as morphine. After perfecting a powerful addictive formula, Purdue begin to aggressively market the drug to doctors and recruits an army of young, female sales representatives to push its “life-changing” benefits to the public. Impressionable college student Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny) is tasked with touring the doctors’ surgeries of Middle America to persuade clinicians to prescribe the drug. In return, she is promised unlimited money and a life of luxury.
As OxyContin profits pile up, so do the bodies: addicts begin to ransack pharmacies searching for pills and teenagers begin crushing and snorting the drug in car parks. Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch) is an honest, decent mechanic living in a small town who is prescribed the drug after complaining about muscle pains. The drug exerts a terrifying grip on him as the doses multiply and the highs become harder to replicate.
No-nonsense lawyer Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba), whose own brother is in jail for dealing drugs, is tasked with investigating suspected criminal wrongdoing on the part of the Sacklers. What follows is a long, arduous battle to pin the blame for the opioid deaths on the billionaire family, who have since pleaded guilty to charges related to Purdue’s opioid marketing but denied wrongdoing. Last year, the family said in a statement that they “sincerely regret” that OxyContin “unexpectedly became part of an opioid crisis that brought grief and loss to far too many families and communities.”
The events of Painkiller are largely fictional, or heavily dramatised, but its stories feel achingly real. Each episode begins with an address by families who have lost loved ones to an opioid overdose. There is no “typical” opioid victim: they are grandfathers, teenage girls, college graduates with a life ahead of them.
The cast is strong across the board. Broderick might be one of Hollywood’s most likeable characters, but he delivers a standout, chilling turn as hypercapitalist villain Richard Sackler. Aduba is equally impressive, bringing her not inconsiderable charisma to what could have been a rather plodding role, but it is Klitsch who steals the show as Glen. In one harrowing scene, Glen ransacks the house in search of his pills after they are hidden by his son Tyler (Jack Mulhern), who is secretly supplying his friends. A gentle man is suddenly overcome with rage and panic: a transformation which will be familiar to anyone who has lived with or had a loved one in thrall to addiction.
Glen’s life is a constant battle between his deep love for his family and the chemical impulse to get high. In the same sentence, Glen tells Tyler that he loves him and vows to be a better father – before asking him for money to buy more OxyContin. The impossible emotional complexity of loving an addict is difficult to capture on screen, but it lies at the core of what makes Painkiller so good.
This realism can often clash with some of the stylistic choices made by director Peter Berg, and Painkiller struggles to settle on an identity. There are moments of drugged out psychedelia that recall Euphoria, but at other points the series feels like a corporate drama. Most of the time, Painkiller manages to gather its disparate narratives into a cohesive whole but Berg’s attempts to experiment visually feel slightly forced and out-of-kilter with the general theme.
Painkiller also fails to examine the rise of OxyContin in the wider context of big pharma and the American healthcare system, which requires citizens to obtain their own private health insurance. As a result, many poorer people are forced into paying for a pill to achieve quick relief from pain rather than embarking on a course of physiotherapy, which an insurer will be hesitant to pay for and organise. Pharmaceutical giants shell out billions of dollars to advertise their products to consumers, helping to normalise the use of painkillers. British viewers used to the pragmatic restraint of NHS primary care will recoil in horror at the ease at which Americans are able to obtain powerful drugs.
Another challenge for Painkiller is that the opioid crisis, and the role of the Sackler family in its creation, has already been covered extensively in film, writing and TV. Danny Strong’s Disney+ mini-series Dopesick, which also focuses on the families ravaged by opioids, was a runaway success that saw lead star Michael Keaton scoop an Emmy for best leading actor. It will be difficult for Painkiller to escape Dopesick’s shadow given their obvious similarities, but it is a powerful piece of drama in its own right and a worthy addition to the increasing body of work scrutinising the mysterious dealings of the Sackler family.
The Sackler name, once emblazoned on numerous museums and other arts institutions across the globe in return for vast financial gifts, has been tarnished beyond repair, and most of those organisations have cut ties and erased it from their buildings. But despite a slew of civil lawsuits over the toll of the opioid crisis, none of the Sacklers have been charged with criminality as part of the terms of a settlement agreed with prosecutors. Rather, they will pay a fine of $5.5 billion to $6 billion in cash over a period of time, with a chunk of the money earmarked for victims.
Painkiller is a perfect illustration of how the opioid crisis cannot be pinned on one individual. Richard Sackler may sit atop an “empire of pain”, to paraphrase Radden Keefe, but the thousands of lawyers, doctors, politicians and sales representatives who propelled the rise of OxyContin are also complicit. Worse still, the horrors depicted in Painkiller continue to plague America to this day.
