each episode of lethal medicine begins with the on-camera testimony of someone directly affected by the opioid crisis in the US. Wait a minute, let’s redo the previous sentence: Every episode of lethal medicine begins with the on-camera testimony of someone directly affected by the oxycodone crisis in the US. So better. Turning into an abstract problem (“crisis” is a word that applies to everything and “opiates” is a generic too… generic) such a concrete drama only benefits its main culprit.
I have no proof, but no doubt either, that that culprit is one of the drivers of the expression “opioid crisis”. And his name is Sackler. The Sackler family pharmaceutical company was responsible for the creation and introduction into the medical market of oxycodone, better known as “Oxy“and better known by series lovers as the pills for which Edie Falco did whatever she had to do in Nurse Jackie. A pain reliever as powerful as it is addictive. A powder keg that detonated years ago.
Superseded in popular imagination by the much seedier fentanyl, the Oxy It has given rise, for now, to two fiction series (not counting Nurse Jackie, of course). Dopesick, with Michael Keaton and Rosario Dawson, was the first.
lethal medicine is the second. And you can see it. Although his starting point is the extraordinary literary-journalistic work of Patrick Radden Keefe (read the empire of painis an order) and Barry Meier, the final result is much less interesting than Dopesickwhich also could be attributed some kind of courage for addressing such a scandalous and current issue. lethal medicine It comes when the pharmaceutical industry has already established that “opioid crisis” as if the thing were not with it.
The panorama is different now and the Sacklers have almost passed into the category of made-up villains. That in the new Netflix series the Sackler plus Sackler is played by a Matthew Broderick characterized almost as Saturday Night Live (those wigs, jeez) almost seems to be part of the master plan of evil. Too much of a lie to seem true. On the other hand, that lethal medicine resort to real testimonials to hook the viewer is narratively questionable. And morally blameless. Or maybe it’s the other way around.