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Purdue Pharma was the subject of Hulu’s 2021 series, “Dopesick,” which focused on the company’s knowledge about OxyContin and how it pushed its sales reps to convince doctors the drug was not addictive. The Food and Drug Administration backed Purdue and set the stage for the drug epidemic that took a hold of the nation. Purdue has agreed to dissolve as a business and the Sackler family, which runs the company, has agreed to pay $4.5 billion the risks of mixing alcohol and summer heat in a bankruptcy settlement. Many who have struggled with opioid addiction, or who have lost a loved one due to OxyContin addiction, are angry that the Sacklers will likely remain one of the wealthiest families in the nation. Gibney sheds light on the changes the medical community was asked to make to accommodate opioids, including how doctors should expand and rethink the meaning of breakthrough pain, and how pain was the fifth vital sign.
Heroin is a stark portrayal of three women on the front lines of the opioid epidemic in Huntington, West Virginia, where there’s an overdose rate of 10 times the national average. Created in association with the Center for Investigative Reporting and directed by Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon, the film is Oscar- and Emmy-nominated. The first season of this Showtime documentary focuses on the opioid epidemic. From Mexican cartels to middle America, the show chronicles the struggle opioids have brought with them.
Netflix’s The Pharmacist Depicts the True Story of Grieving Father’s Fight Against the Opioid Epidemic
These obstacles did not stop Schneider, who continued his own investigation by calling every house in the area. He also started keeping meticulous recordings of the conversations he had, including with the potential witnesses in his son’s murder case. The audio recordings, often played over images of the Schneider family, the pharmacy where Schneider worked or shots of Schneider in his home, make up much of the series. Eventually, Schneider found Shane Redding — a nearby resident who said she had witnessed the crime. Redding revealed that the killer was, in fact, Jeffery Hall — the initial eyewitness.
Between 2000 and 2001, abuse of OxyContin around the United States became widespread, prompting closer attention from national media. St. Bernard Parish, which had a population of about 75,000 at the time, became known as one of the hubs of the epidemic, with one of the highest per capita overdose rates in Louisiana, according to the series, and the community received coverage from national outlets. A December 2000 TIME article referenced in the series described an “epidemic” of OxyContin abuse in St. Bernard Parish, noting that at the time, at least five people in the town had overdosed on the drug.
Hall, the son of Redding’s best friend, was 15 years old when he killed Danny Jr. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2000 and served 13 years of a 15-year prison sentence, according to the documentary. Hall, who appears in the series, tells filmmakers he took his time in prison to try and better himself, finish school and work on anger management. But the series reveals how those who began to abuse the drug learned to crush the tablets into a powder that could be inhaled and was highly addictive. Eventually, prosecutors noticed that small towns where people hadn’t locked their doors for decades were drowning in crime and desperation. John Kapoor, the founder of the drugmaker Insys, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for masterminding a scheme to bribe doctors to prescribe a dangerous painkiller.
2.Part Two While pharmaceutical companies mass-market the synthetic opioid fentanyl, lawmakers continue to grease the opioid pipeline. But now one of the big problems is that an enormous demand has been created because you have a lot of people who are addicted. And one of his patients was a woman named Carol Bosley, who had suffered a terrible neck injury as a result of a car accident. She became terribly addicted to opioids as a result of prescription of a number of narcotics.
Opioids, Inc.
His search led him to Dr. Jacqueline Cleggett, who ran a pain management clinic in New Orleans and wrote most of the prescriptions that patients brought to the pharmacy. According to Schneider, the prescriptions were similar, often prescribing 40 mg or more of OxyContin along with other medications like Xanax and Soma (taken together, the combination of drugs was known as the “holy trinity”). Cleggett, described as running a “pill mill,” was one of several doctors around the country who sold prescriptions for such drugs for profit.
He decided to face down this national health crisis by creating an addiction program inside the county jail that is succeeding where the federal government is failing. MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff investigates the role synthetics have played in the deadliest drug crisis in American history in this roughly 45-minute documentary, aired in 2017. One Nation, Overdosed profiles the rise of fentanyl, a potent synthetic heroin analog, in Dayton, Ohio, briefly touching on each of the major events that led to a recent rash of overdoses in the midwestern state. A significant rise in heroin overdose deaths marked the second wave in 2010. Schneider started cautioning customers, who often did not show signs of chronic illness or pain, that the drugs they were prescribed might be too strong for their ailments.
Hulu’s ‘Dopesick’ tells the chilling story of America’s opioid crisis
But I think that what’s disconcerting is that people died of overdoses at Webster’s clinic. And so many people were dying that it caused the medical examiner to look into it and ultimately caused the DEA raid on the place. It’s a crime, he says, that was committed by pharmaceutical companies, distributors, pharmacists and doctors, all looking to alcohol and atrial fibrillation profit. Netflix original, is one of the few that doesn’t dramatize or wallow in the cyclic tragedy of ecstatic heroin highs, the scratching withdrawal pangs. Instead, it honestly follows four young men struggling to recover from opioid addiction over a year and a half at Jacob’s Ladder, a farming-based recovery center in Aurora, West Virginia.
- N its latest addition to an ever-growing collection of documentaries, Netflix’s The Pharmacist, which premiered Feb. 5, presents a moving look at the ways grief can spur a person into activism.
- Have used prescription painkillers for non-medical reasons at least once.
- Jan Rader, deputy chief of the Huntington Fire Department, fights for funds to buy naloxone, an opioid antagonist that helps overdose victims start breathing again.
- He decided to face down this national health crisis by creating an addiction program inside the county jail that is succeeding where the federal government is failing.
- Accused of knowing his patients were selling the overflow from his monumental prescriptions to addicts, Hurwitz says he’s just too trusting.
But that gives you some sense of the three-part structure of this crime, and also the blurry line between licit pharmaceutical sales and, essentially, cartel sales. As national attention turned to the opioid epidemic, Schneider continued in his efforts to take down Cleggett. Schneider grew obsessive in his fight against the spread of the opioid crisis, according to the numerous audio recordings he provided for the series. He ended up collaborating with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other authorities that were independently investigating Cleggett, which eventually resulted in her license being suspended.
West Virginia, a predominantly blue-collar state, exemplifies the cyclical nature of a drug crisis. A lot of people in these rural areas are employed in physical labor, get injured and receive pills through legitimate means. A record number of drug overdoses, an increase driven at least partially understanding alcohol withdrawal shakes & how to stop them by synthetic opioid use. After they’ve exhausted other options, chronic pain patients try a new approach to treat and cure their pain. “This Might Hurt” documents their time with Dr. Howard Schubiner, who gets to the root of their pain by revealing the buried trauma causing it.
Women in Recovery
And so, fentanyl began to be imported, first from China, sometimes just by mail. There would be websites in China that would say, “Hey, America, you want some fentanyl? And we look at a task force, in the film, that’s trying to stanch that.
But eventually, Finnix winds up in front of a grand jury, ashen and shell-shocked. When a prosecutor asks how his patients reacted to the drug OxyContin, he offers a chilling reply. In Hulu’s Dopesick, Michael Keaton plays Sam Finnix as the kind of family doctor anyone would want taking care of them. It has been a landmark year for the opioid crisis, both in court decisions impacting former executives of Insys Therapeutics — investigated in the 2020 documentary ‘Opioids, Inc.’ with the Financial Times — and in the toll on human lives. This powerful glimpse of the U.S. opioid crisis earned an Oscar nod and won an Emmy for Outstanding Short Documentary. But we do know that a number of senior prosecutors in the Department of Justice found this 120-page prosecution memo extremely convincing.
She pleaded guilty in 2009 to illegally dispensing controlled substances, but faced no prison time. Cleggett appears in The Pharmacist’s final part and defends herself against accusations of wrongdoing. After his son’s tragic death, a Louisiana pharmacist goes to extremes to expose the rampant corruption behind the opioid addiction crisis. Executives from Insys, the maker of Subsys, became the first pharmaceutical bosses to be handed prison time for their role in America’s opioid epidemic. I think that one of the problems that enters into this equation that’s even bigger than the opioid crisis is the problem of economic incentives in medicine. And nowhere is that more evident than in the opioid crisis — where the incentive, whether you internalize it, whether you recognize it consciously or not, is to prescribe more and more and more because you’re making more money.
Her husband became terribly concerned and she died of an overdose not too long after. Many well-known companies in health care have been involved in manufacturing and distribution of opioids, including Johnson & Johnson, Mallinckrodt, Endo International, Allergan, Teva, McKesson, Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart. Over the 40-minute span of the documentary, the overdoses pile up — in the bathroom of a local pizza joint, Gino’s; up against a counter in Sheetz; behind a locked door in a home. As Rader and her fire department run from one scene to the next, you’re struck by the route mundanity, the well-oiled practice of their movements.
Dr. Aashish Manglik, MD
Produced and written by John Grant, the roughly hour-long film traces the overlapping causes that culminated in the exponential growth of opioid addiction and deaths nationwide from the late 20th century to the present. N its latest addition to an ever-growing collection of documentaries, Netflix’s The Pharmacist, which premiered Feb. 5, presents a moving look at the ways grief can spur a person into activism. Spanning the early days of the U.S. opioid epidemic, the four-part documentary series shows how one person, after suffering a loss, finds a modicum of healing through the act of saving others. “A few months ago, we caught a doctor selling pills out of his car to an 11-year-old girl … and when we arrested him, he thanked us,” Hoogenakker’s prosecutor tells an agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration, played by Rosario Dawson. “At that moment, we knew that what we got going on in coal country is similar to San Francisco at the start of the AIDS crisis. … Our community is ground zero for a growing national catastrophe.” You know, “OK, have some OxyContin, it’ll be fine. And don’t worry, you won’t get addicted.”
“The Trade” was directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Matthew Heineman who also directed “Cartel Land,” which was nominated for an Academy Award and took home three Primetime Emmys. “The Pharmacist” is the story of pharmacist Dan Schneider, who works to find justice for his son, killed while buying crack. Schneider then realizes young people are coming to his pharmacy with prescriptions for high doses of the powerful opioid OxyContin. Not willing to lose any more sons and daughters, Schneider tapes conversations and begins a fight against Big Pharma.
But in The Pharmacist, the resolution of Danny Jr.’s murder is really just the beginning for Schneider’s journey. Trying to resume a normal life, Dan returns to work at the pharmacy and makes an alarming discovery. But often areas depicted in such shows can feel relentlessly depressing and deprived.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed , which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year, chronicles Goldin’s career and her activism in the wake of her own years-long recovery from opioid addiction, a time she describes as “a darkness of the soul”. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed , the documentary following renowned artist Nan Goldin’s campaign against members of the billionaire Sackler family and their role in the opioid crisis, has been nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category. If director Laura Poitras wins, she will be just one of a handful of documentarians to have earned a pair of Academy Awards over the course of her career. Her documentary Citizenfour , about whistleblower Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency spying scandal, won the Oscar in the same category in 2015. ‘Dopesick’ tells the story of America’s opioid crisis The new miniseries, adapted from journalist Beth Macy’s critically acclaimed book, shows opioid addiction ravaging one rural Virginia town. This Oscar-nominated film follows three women — a fire chief, a judge and a street missionary — battling West Virginia’s devastating opioid epidemic.