‘Dopesick’: New Hulu Series is Scarily Relevant

It’s not hard to relate to the characters we meet who carry painful pasts and conflicting desires about how to find a better way forward, simply for their humanity.

 Highly respected by his town, Dr. Finnix works as a family doctor and can only go so far to help his patients—young and old alike—who suffer long-term pain from labor intensive jobs like coal mining. It’s easy to see why the claims from the pharmaceutical reps for OxyContin would soon appeal to Dr. Finnix who has a heart to help his patients get their lives back. Producer Danny Strong immediately adds suspense as he flashes forward to a scene of Dr. Finnix in a courtroom testifying against OxyContin, saying how many of his patients—some of whom we may have just met and felt sorry for—died because of the drug. One of these patients named Betsy, played by Kaitlyn Dever, is of particular interest: the youngest female miner from a family of miners, she was the first in their town to be put on OxyContin because of an injury.

 Dopesick doesn’t just flip between the beginning of and the perhaps familiar ending of the OxyContin story—the lawsuit against Purdue Pharma for fraudulent advertising and misinforming doctors about the addictive nature of OxyContin. It also brings in scenes from the middle of the story—the start of the lawsuit in 2002. Not only does this build a foreboding, serious mood similar to that of an investigative drama like Law and Order: SVU or an air of mystery (even though the we know the end) like another Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, but it also introduces us to more key players in the story right away. We meet DEA Special Agent Bridget Myer, played by Rosario Dawson, whose interest was piqued to investigate OxyContin years before lawyers Randy Ramseyer (John Hoogenakker) and Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgard) started digging into the evidence to build a case. 

 With the stage full of characters—doctors, patients, lawyers, pharmaceutical company workers, and government officials—Dopesick uses complexity to its advantage to answer questions like how something so evil and atrocious could actually happen. We’re getting small doses from each key player over a nine-year period, seeing how they painfully compounded into a crisis. With a poignant and sometimes haunting script threading across the timeline, we see how national narratives were incited to shape public perception of opioids and the direct effect those words had. We see how a public health crisis started with well-intentioned doctors who became pawns for a pharmaceutical company’s profit and ended with all the people who paid for it with their lives. We see the ploy for what it is early on…and it’s terrifying. The series doesn’t hesitate to show emotional depth in these characters, and the cast drives home the suspense with their believable performances—a difficult endeavor especially when it comes to portraying the experience of drug abuse. Kelly Lawler, in her review of the series for USA Today, described the cast as, “excellent and empathetic, helping ground the series. Keaton is at his best, mastering a character who’s a mess of contradictions and transformation.”

 It’s not hard to relate to the characters we meet who carry painful pasts and conflicting desires about how to find a better way forward, simply for their humanity. However, the subject matter of Dopesick is what makes it the most relatable. With names we recognize, like the FDA and the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma,—only one of many companies that are part of Big Pharma—attacked in this damning narrative, the relevance of Dopesick is something viewers will need to wrestle with themselves and answer: why this story and why right now?

 Set within many of our lifetimes and truly not that long ago, Dopesick begs the question what has changed and what may still be happening today? Are leading pharmaceutical companies, some of which we know now more than ever and who are responsible for the most expensive lawsuits and settlements in history, to be trusted? Is it possible that government agencies like the FDA can mislead the public again and commit crimes against humanity with products they release to the market that end up being dangerous and sometimes even deadly? Who else becomes complicit in these crimes if questions or concerns around how these drugs are developed, tested, approved, and paid for are suppressed? Who is liable for the damage to millions of people’s lives—to their physical health and livelihoods?

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