The Heart Wrenching Netflix Series ‘Painkiller’ Might Just Be the Beginning of America’s Drug Problem

The new fictionalized documentary ‘Painkiller’ on Netflix delves into the rise of the Sackler family, founders of Purdue Pharma, and their role in creating, distributing, and manipulating America into becoming a nation of opium addicts through the sale of its addictive painkiller Oxycontin.

If you come from where I come from, central New Jersey, or grew up in the 90’s or 2000’s nearly anywhere in America, you likely know someone who partied with Oxys, was addicted to Oxys, overdosed on Oxys, or who OD’d on heroin or fentanyl years later. After all, Oxycontin, Fentanyl and heroin, are all from the same painkilling household — the Opioid Family. The same family that destroyed an entire generation in China and led to a three-year war with the British known as The Opium Wars (1839–1842). The same family that just last year claimed over 100,000 American lives.

Of course, heroin is nothing new and Purdue’s move to package it in a slow-release pill and call it Oxycontin is essentially what legendary Brooklyn MC Mos Def meant when he rapped,

Screaming ‘Brand New!’ when they just sanitized the old shit,

Suppose it’s, just another clever Jedi mind trick…

Most Def had bars that tapped into the ethos of America and Big Pharma. But what Purdue did to flood America with Junk wasn’t a “Jedi mind trick,” and really, it wasn’t even that “clever.” Instead, it was a simple drug dealer’s playbook: Lie about the drug’s effectiveness and addictiveness. Ram it past the FDA via whatever means necessary. Then, send out an army of sexy, college-educated salespeople to pass out free trials and shoddy “scientific” pamphlets to doctors with one goal in mind — prescribe! prescribe! prescribe! And as any good drug dealer knows, once the drug is out there, it will sell itself. After all, it’s new and improved heroine.

Along the way, a few people got filthy rich while millions more became addicted and destroyed their careers, families, and futures. An army of pharmacists, scientists, doctors, government bureaucrats, salespeople, and health care professionals working together to make our nation sick — what an incredible American tragedy!

And today, while Purdue Pharma has been fined and penalized to the point of bankruptcy, America is steel reeling from the damage it caused. According to the stats, from 1999 to 2019, over 500,000 people in the U.S. overdosed on Oxycontin, and millions more lives were destroyed. Today, if we can admit it, addiction is our biggest problem as a nation, and one that is only growing.

Painkiller is a great doc-series we should all watch if we can bear it, and the story of Oxycontin is a sad, sad story. Here are some of my thoughts, reflections, and questions after seeing the documentary:

• Classism. In the film, it appears that Purdue, a company based in Connecticut and comprised of mostly waspy northern prep-school kids, released Oxycontin on working class neighborhoods around the U.S. There is an element of classicism that plays out in the film, and it seems to be an accurate portrayal of how things really went down. Even if Oxys weren’t marketed directly to poor people, uninsured people who could not afford more reasonable pain treatment like physical therapy, massage, etc. were the ones that were prescribed heroine instead.
• WTF is wrong with the FDA and can it be improved? The FDA cannot be trusted, and letting Big Pharma test their own drugs and provide their own case studies is a recipe for disaster and corruption. Underpaid bureaucrats at the FDA cannot be expected to resist Big Pharma’s money and power. Congress can’t even resist it. The question then is who or what entity can be trusted to evaluate drugs fairly and efficaciously in our country?
• Loss of Trust. The series made me think how many people all around America who lost loved ones and had their lives destroyed from Oxys, are likely the same people who were skeptical of the Covid vaccine. Why were they skeptical? Because the vaccine was created by Big Pharma, rushed through the FDA after limited testing, and then falsely marketed (remember, the vaccine was supposed to stop the spread of Covid) to the American people in the same way Oxycontin was. All the profits were also collected by Big Pharma.
• Who controls us? The fact that many Americans who believed in the vaccine were not at the very least sympathetic to their fellow American’s skepticism is incredible. But it’s also understandable, given that the American media is funded by Big Pharma (in 2020, TV ad spending from the pharmaceutical industry accounted for 75 percent of total ad spending), and American politicians are funded by Big Pharma (seventy-two senators and 302 members of the House of Representatives cashed a check from the pharmaceutical industry ahead of the 2020 election, more than two-thirds of Congress).
• Together, the American press and American politicians did everything they could to shame, debunk, cancel, and destroy skeptics — painting them as conspiracy theorists, MAGA maniacs, and anti-vaxxers — a playbook very similar to the one Purdue used to discredit people who died from Oxys when they called them junkies, criminals, and drug addicts. This is not to imply that Oxycontin and the vaccine are the same by any means. But it does show that whatever Big Pharma wants to sell to the American people, they have our press and politicians on the payroll to help them do so.
• Doctors’ role in our health & sickness. What are American doctors doing? How could they not know that heroin is addictive? How can our doctors be so irresponsible? What is going on in medical school? Have doctors become so over-specialized and hyper-focused that they’ve lost touch with or never learned anything about holistic health and well-being?
• Why pills? Why are we prescribing pills, instead of physical therapy and other treatments, for so many types of pain? Where does this inability or resistance to deal with, listen, and learn to pain come from? Is this a sentiment or weakness of the American people, or is it being pushed on us by Big Pharma?
• Wordplay (or played by words). Words are important, and most people don’t read beyond the title. Oxycontin is heroin. But by dicing it up in a lab and giving it a bunch of scientific names, meaning is obfuscated to the point where even doctors and healthcare professionals seem unsure of what they’re actually prescribing.
• If you’re gonna prescribe it, maybe you should try it. Most of the doctors and people involved in prescribing Oxycontin appear to have never tried it. If they did, they would understand that’s it’s a strong and addictive drug… I was reminded of the first time I tried Adderall (sometime in my 30s during Mardi Gras) and thought: Holy shit! — they’ve been giving this stuff to kids! This is a drug! I can’t believe my friends took this to get through high school! I wonder what percentage of parents of kids prescribed with ADHD have ever tried Adderall, and if after doing so, realized that doctors are giving their kids the best amphetamine ever invented. How many doctors tried Adderall and other drugs before prescribing them to patients?

• Narco States. The U.S. is a Narco State and Big Pharma controls our press, politics, and media and entertainment. In the U.S., drug dealers wear suits and sell “legal” drugs without the fear of being imprisoned or murdered. The most popular legal drugs appear to be derivatives or pervasions of illegal drugs, ie. Heroin = Oxycontin, Adderall = amphetamine, etc. This allows Big Pharma to do the Mos Def: say their latest products are “brand new,” but really, they’re just sanitizing (and patenting) “the old shit…”
• Mexico is also a Narco State, where bandits wage war and terror and risk their lives to smuggle drugs across the border. Here in Mexico, kidnappings, beheadings, mass graves, torture sessions, turf wars, and horrors that most Americans, including myself, could never imagine, make the daily news… Mexican Cartels and America’s Big Pharma are both fighting for the same customer base — Americans. Who is fighting for Americans?
• RFK Jr. Robert F. Kennedy JR is the only candidate to publicly say the first thing he’d do if elected is issue an executive order to prevent Big Pharma from advertising on TV — something that’s already illegal in most countries around the world. This would probably save the lives of millions of Americas. This anti-Big Pharma stance is also likely the reason his name is dragged through the mud constantly, and one of the reasons the Democratic party would never get behind him. This is just an observation, not an endorsement of RFK JR.

To conclude, the saddest thing about Painkiller is that it’s not the story of the final chapter of America’s addiction crisis, or seemingly even close. From the looks of youtube videos of American streets — San Francisco, LA, Portland, Kensington, Oakland, etc. etc. — the Opioid Family and Friends are turning Americans into mere shadows of themselves at an alarming rate.

Furthermore, Big Pharma’s grip on our health has only gotten stronger since the pandemic (Pfizer made $100 billion in 2022), and our dependence on them to take our pain away will likely increase. In a bizarre but interesting political twist, people who used to be skeptical and suspicious of Big Pharma in the past are now true believers or tongue-biters who fear that questioning Big Pharma could be interpreted as an “anti-vax” or conspiracy-theorist position — a stance that can have seriously negative repercussions on a person’s reputation, career, and livelihood if exposed. Of course, creating a “no questions, trust the science environment” is exactly what Big Pharma wants.

When you combine the increasing strength of Big Pharma with the growing power and ruthlessness of the Mexican Cartels, it looks like this is probably just the beginning of America’s drug problem. And from what I can see, the country I love and come from doesn’t seem to have a plan: Most mainstream journalists don’t appear to be that interested, and most politicians have other things to talk about. After all, there’s global warming, Ukraine, racism, Donald Trump, etc. These are keywords that get attention, and attention means clicks, and clicks mean ad revenue — and ad revenue that comes mostly from Big Pharma means Don’t question Big Pharma. And so it goes…

Furthermore, the idea that we could all come together to find a new, innovative plan to stop addiction and ‘Do Less Drugs’ in our country isn’t sexy — and it certainly isn’t profitable.

Lastly, many Americans, including most of our politicians, seem more concerned with solving the whole world’s problems than with solving our own. Save the World has been America’s game since the end of World War II, and it’s not like we’re going to suddenly stop just because a couple (hundreds of thousands? Millions?) of our citizens are overdosing. But sadly, these days, we spend our energy and money elsewhere while our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, friends, and fellow countrymen, continue to live and die in the throes of addiction and despair.