‘Painkiller’ or the voracity of a pharmaceutical company

The creators of Netflix drama Painkiller, a powerful denunciation of the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma and its star drug, the analgesic OxyContin, cover their backs from hypothetical responsibilities by including relatives of real victims of the highly addictive opioid in each episode. The production stresses that “although the series is based on real events,” some characters and dialogues are the result of fiction, something perfectly understandable and dubiously justifiable, and which sounds like a legal recommendation.

In any case, the series is a perfect example of corporate voracity: anything goes if the bottom line is positive, and so it must have been when the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the bankruptcy agreement that the pharmaceutical company filed in 2019, in a maneuver to protect members of the Sackler family, its owners, from lawsuits filed by thousands of opioid addiction victims in exchange for a $6 billion compensation package. Of course, the huge sales and vast profits derived from the painkiller would not have been possible without the cooperation of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of doctors who prescribed it without a second thought.

A chilling fact: the death toll from OxyContin is estimated at 500,000, a figure known to Richard Sackler, the president of Purdue Pharma, played by an undaunted Matthew Broderick. Painkiller is a remarkable series, created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, that connects with the self-critical capacity that the powerful American audiovisual industry occasionally shows.

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