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The Non-Fictionalized Version of Netflix’s “Painkiller”, Told By Someone Who Lived Through It
There is no one story to the opioid epidemic, but this is mine.
I remember being maybe 12, which would have made it the year 1999. The same year the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma started truly cashing in on their newly developed drug Oxycontin, and advertising it as “believed to be less addictive than other opioids like it”. Key words there, as mentioned in the Netflix limited series, are “Believed to be”.
Believed to be by who? That’s what the limited series asks and I have an absolute answer — by only those people who profited off of making themselves believe it. Meaning the Sackler family primarily, along with every drug rep for the company and the gullible, greedy doctors they made believe it.
Everyone I knew at age 12 who took oxycontin, was not prescribed them and was terribly addicted to them. The demand kept going up so, in turn, so did the street prices for them. At their peak, I recall them going for $1 per milligram — meaning a single Oxy 80, which was what most addicts were in search of, was selling for $80.
So now Purdue was not only turning people into addicts as a direct result of their actions and drug, but they were also indirectly turning otherwise…
