CHANNELING A QUIET KILLER –
Aug. 4, 2023 – Based on work by investigative journalists Barry Meier and Patrick Radden Keefe, Painkiller is a coarse-grained social epic, angry and impassioned, intent on covering all bases. Having introduced us to Sackler in his sterile McMansion, the plot swings out through small-town Appalachia. It spotlights the good-hearted mechanic who’s sliding towards addiction; the “Malibu Barbie” sales reps who target the family GPs; the whole rotten Venn diagram of federal government and big pharma. In the past 20 years an estimated 300,000 Americans have died after overdosing on prescription pain meds. But this is an epidemic largely confined to rural working-class communities. The consequences of OxyContin don’t trouble the Purdue executives up in leafy Connecticut. I’m guessing they haven’t impinged much on Broderick’s life, either.
He shakes his head. “I don’t think I’ve known anyone who’s been on OxyContin. Or who crushed pills and snorted them. Unless they didn’t tell me. But it’s a sprawling, complicated story, and we all have some experience. My mom had very bad pain from cancer. She was on those kinds of drugs for years – not OxyContin, but it was an opioid – and they helped her. So it’s difficult, because I can see the need for painkillers.” He mulls it over. “I think the original intent to develop the drug is not inherently evil. It’s only when you get people hiding the evidence of how addictive it is that it becomes an awful story.”
The deaths may be localised, but the crime scene is vast. Everyone’s implicated and compromised. Who’s the monster, Broderick wonders. “Is it the man who developed OxyContin? Or is it the doctors who prescribed it, or the drugstores that sold it? There are a lot of villains. It’s too simple to blame it all on one person.” He grins, embarrassed. “I’m sounding like Richard Sackler here. But it’s true. A lot of people have done bad things in their life but if you talk to them, they never think they’re doing bad things. That’s what’s really scary: people’s capacity for self-delusion.”
