Anyone watching this on Hulu? If you can get past the way it jumps around it time (it would have been better if it was linear) it’s quite good as it dramatizes the rise and spread of opioid abuse, specifically Oxy.
There are several threads running through it, from the boardroom at Purdue Pharma (the actor playing Sackler is even better than Richard Kind) to the DEA and a small mining town (Michael Keaton plays the doctor you wish you had until a certain point about halfway through)
I’ve been curious about this show since early this year when one of my students had to miss class because he was acting opposite Michael Keaton in a scene on this show. LEGIT ABSENCE. I think it was a scene in a rehab facility.
I like it a lot, for the most part. There’s a totally irrelevant subplot a gay character coming out to her parents and an obviously telegraphed death, but the performances are first rate and Michael Keaton’s arc takes some interesting turns.
So I watched Goliath and its last season was about big pharma, and reading comments about that season elsewhere, someone mentioned Dopesick, so now I am watching this.
And I just don’t get how these drugs (OxyContin, Fentanyl) could ever even be legal, let alone presribed in the quantities they have been.
Speaking from personal experience, it’s a lot tougher to get opioids out patient now that people are aware of the addiction issues.
In the last couple of months before I had a hip replacement I was in so much constant pain that my doctor was prescribing Oxy with a Morphine chaser. Despite my addictive personality, I somehow managed to not get hooked, probably because it made the pain disappear but never got me particularly high.
Anyway, I could only get a script for a week’s worth at a time, and in order to refill it I had to come by the pain clinic for a urine test to make sure I wasn’t abusing.
I understand that type of pain must be hell but I still have strong doubts if it is worth risking getting addicted to this.
More than 932,000 people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.1 In 2020, 91,799 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States.
Opioids—mainly synthetic opioids (other than methadone)—are currently the main driver of drug overdose deaths. 82.3% of opioid-involved overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids.
Opioids can be an incredibly useful tool in very controlled circumstances for most people - that is often for acute treatment of pain that really can’t be helped by any other means. A small (but very meaningful ~ 0.1-0.2) fraction of people have a pleasurable reaction to opioids that can lead to addiction. We don’t really understand the risk factors that would predict who would has a stronger potential to become addicted. That’s a huge problem, and why the drug is now correctly controlled as it should be.
The real problem was when everyone was being proscribed large amounts of these drugs with little to no supervision - then the denominator is large, and a huge number of people have problems.
That said, when you actually need something this strong, you may be very glad they exist. There are some levels of pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and we simply don’t yet have better solutions - maybe some day we will and we can phase out use of these drugs, but for now I’m glad they are an option under the right circumstances.
To be more specific: using proscription pain pills like Oxy, as they were “intended” to be used. It’s a different story when you take the oxy your doctor gave you and you crush it up and snort/inject it (which is referred to as misuse). I should have been more specific, my bad.
The show makes it very clear that OxyContin is just as addictive as Heroin, which some googling seems to confirm
The stigma that oxycodone is safer than heroin comes from its use case and nothing more. These two drugs are very similar in structure and the way that they affect the brain when used. Both are addictive and both pose risk for addiction. However, because oxycodone and heroin aren’t framed in the same way, oxycodone may actually be more addictive.
So which one is worse, oxycodone or heroin? Heroin and oxycodone pills are practically the same when we look at the chemicals in each and have very similar effects. Heroin and oxycodone pills are both highly addictive and dangerous. We can no longer compare one to the other as better or worse. Both can and will kill you. It is time for people to stop pinning oxycodone vs. heroin and begin talking about these drugs being equally addictive, dangerous, and deadly. This epidemic has already claimed so many people’s lives, so we need to help people chose to enter treatment and live a life of recovery.
10/10 for me, just incredible work. Of course, I assume the facts presented in the show (such as the ones in above shots) are factual and not made up, that would bring my estimation down.
I think US should heavily reconsider some aspects of its healthcare laws. Get inspired by Germany or something.
Many months after we watched Dopesick we stumbled across a special on Fentanyl. If you thought Dopesick was depressing, the problem with Fentanyl is we have absolutely no hand on it. And it kills much faster via overdoses than Oxy. And since it is an investigative show, all of the stories are 100% real.
