Painkiller, a Netflix drama out Aug. 10, follows the mint green OxyContin pill’s trail of destruction from the very top—Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), the former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma—to the middlemen—the sales reps deployed to blanket the country (Dina Shihabi and West Duchovny)—to the everyday Americans whose lives were irrevocably changed (Taylor Kitsch) by the drug. At the bottom, Edie Flowers, a tenacious investigator for the U.S. Attorneys’ Office (Uzo Aduba) tries to trace the subsequent addiction crisis back to its rotten core. At its center, Painkiller is about the key moments that led to the opioid epidemic—and how they could have been stopped, but weren’t.
At one point, for instance, the lone FDA examiner charged with overseeing the approval process for OxyContin, Curtis Wright (Noah Harpster), became a serious roadblock for Purdue. But Wright would soon sign off on a drug application stating that “delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug.” The false claim, anchored by those two words—“is believed”—would quell the anxieties of doctors and patients around the country. And a year after OxyContin was approved, Wright left the FDA. He eventually went to work for Purdue.
Painkiller’s plot is based on two pieces of writing: the book Pain Killer by Barry Meier and the New Yorker article “The Family That Built the Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe. (Meier is credited as a...
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