Series like Dopesick and Mr Bates vs the Post Office perform a vital role
For all of you still smarting at the injustice and corruption brought to light by Mr Bates vs the Post Office, prepare to be riled again with the arrival of Dopesick on BBC2.
The US drama debuted here on Disney+ in 2021, when Mr Bates was but a twinkle in an ITV commissioner’s eye. With eight hours of airtime and plenty of money to spend on a stellar cast and lavish locations, you might expect a very different beast from the homespun ITV offering. In fact, Dopesick offers a similarly unsparing focus on the devastating damage that greedy people can cause and proves once more the power of storytelling in bringing us the humanity behind the headlines.
Both stories began in the 1990s. But if the Post Office scandal resided on the edge of our consciousness until ITV’s drama brought it to our proper attention earlier this year, the OxyContin outrage exposed by Dopesick sat even further away. I can remember reading about it in a magazine more than a decade ago: how Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, developed and sold this high-strength painkiller that arguably fuelled the US opioid epidemic, responsible for a reported 600,000 deaths over two decades.
Based on a book by Beth Macy, Dopesick goes further, laying bare how Purdue targeted communities like mining towns where physical labour resulted in a lot of chronic injury, made false claims about the drug’s safety through manipulative advertising and outright lies, and then lobbied and tried to buy its way out of trouble as the walls finally started closing in.
While Mr Bates made a corporate enemy out of a blinking computer under a desk, Dopesick’s malefactors are more varied. We see the almost cartoon f igures of the beyond-rich Succession-esque Sacklers, squabbling between themselves while classical music plays. At their centre, Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) screams, “We’re going to cure the world of its pain,” even while he pours more addictive drugs down its throat and counts his fortune.
More disturbing still is the powerlessness of the authorities to legislate against OxyContin, thanks to its FDA-approved “non-addictive” label (the man who certified this later joined Purdue), and the empty greed of the pharmaceutical sales reps, competing to sell more drugs at higher strengths, chasing the carrot of a prize trip to Bermuda.
