TV Pick of the Week: Dopesick - review by Yvette Huddleston

The opioid crisis in the US has been covered in various documentaries and recently also in the Netflix drama Pain Killer, as well as in movies such as last year’s Pain Hustlers starring Emily Blunt.

This eight-part drama series, first broadcast on Disney+ in 2021, focusses on the personal stories of the ordinary people whose lives were affected, destroyed and in many cases ended, by becoming addicted to OxyContin, a prescription drug developed by Purdue Pharma which was aggressively marketed as being non-addictive. The series also explores the legal case that was painstakingly built by tenacious lawyers and investigators over several years who noticed the alarming pattern of addiction – and death.

In the opening episode we meet dedicated small-town physician Dr Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton) who is based out in the Appalachian mountain area tending to his patients, mostly low-income, blue-collar workers, many of them working in physically demanding jobs, principally in the local coal mines. Injuries are commonplace and chronic pain is an issue. These are people who can’t afford to take time off work, so they need medication that works quickly and can keep pain at bay. As it happens, they are exactly the kind of community that Purdue Pharma are targeting with their new drug.

The narrative structure moves back and forth in time – the ‘present’ is 2005, at a hearing in which Finnix is one of the witnesses, saying of his patients gravely: “I can’t believe how many of them are dead now” – and the storyline takes us back to the mid-1990s when the drug first appeared. Finnix, like many clinicians, was initially reluctant to prescribe OxyContin due to the well-documented concerns around addiction and abuse in relation to opioids. Keen young sales representative Billy Cutler (Will Poulter) is one of the team assembled by Purdue Pharma and its owners the Sackler family to persuade doctors of the drug’s efficacy and safety.

Caught in the middle of this are people like young miner Betsy (Kaitlyn Dever) who has chronic back pain after an accident underground and is desperate to keep working so she can earn enough money to move away with her girlfriend to start a new life somewhere more welcoming and less judgmental. Meanwhile assistant US attorneys Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard) and Randy Ramseye (John Hoogenakker) are steadfastly seeking justice for the many victims. Sometimes difficult but compelling viewing that exposes the terrible human cost of unfettered greed.