A Cure For Pain:Painkiller.

"Where is the sacrifice? And tell me where, where is the faith? Someday there'll be a cure for a pain" Cure For Pain, Morphine

"All human life is a combination of two things. Running away from pain and running towards pleasure" - Richard Sackler

"This shit is addictive as fuck" former Purdue Pharma employee

OxyContin is a very strong, very effective, painkiller. It's also a highly addictive drug and has been responsible for tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of deaths across the USA and elsewhere. The makes of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, knew this very early on but they denied it strenuously. Purdue Pharma, and its owners - the Sackler family, were a very powerful organisation and the people who were getting addicted to, and dying from, OxyContin weren't powerful at all. In fact, as their addictions took hold they became ever less powerful.

In a sense, it's remarkable anything was done about it at all but Painkiller (Netflix, directed by Peter Berg, created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, and based on two books:- Patrick Radden Keefe's The Family That Built An Empire Of Pain and Barry Meier's Pain Killer:An Empire Of Deceit And The Origin Of America's Opioid Epidemic) manages to tell the story of the Sackler family, the drugs they pushed, and the incredible amount of damage they caused in a way that is engaging and easy to follow.n If, often, shocking.

It's also tense and, of course, addictive viewing. The story is told in four different strands and the most recent one involves Virginia investigator Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba) arriving in Washington DC to meet with her colleagues Brianna Ortiz (Ana Cruz Kayne) and Bill Havens (Ron  Lea). Ortiz and Havens are trying to consolidate multiple law suits against Purdue Pharma into one because they believe that gives them a better chance of getting justice, or at least some kind of payment.

Flowers, who we soon learn has been on the case of Purdue for years, seems, at first, resigned to failure but when she learns that they've deposed the chairman and president of Purdue, Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), she becomes a lot more interested. Ortiz and Havens enlist Flowers to work with them and, as she does, she tells them the story of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, and her attempts to bring them to justice.

There's so many digressions into the history of the Sackler family and big pharma, and so many images of explosions and fractals, that sometimes it's like watching Oppenheimer if it'd been directed by Adam Curtis. Or HyperNormalisation if it'd been directed by Christopher Nolan. 

Richard Sackler's dad, Raymond (Sam Anderson) and his two brothers, Arthur (Clark Gregg) and Mortimer (John Rothman), started Purdue Pharma with Arthur being the main man. He realised the pharmaceutical business wasn't about anything but sales and marketing - and lies, he branded lithium "a lobotomy in a bottle" (and he knew about lobotomies, he'd carried them out) but, even better - to him, it was a lobotomy with repeat custom.

That seems to me to be a direct result of the US giving it's health care system over to capitalist private providers (whose bottom line, always, is increasing shareholder's profits and, never, helping people with medical problems). The Sacklers moved into using cocaine for dental care and were awarded a contract for prescribing Valium. Described here as "the world's first blockbuster drug".

The Sacklers became very very rich and soon began a process of culturewashing. Or, as Wikipedia has it, reputation laundering. In Britain alone, the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery were taking donations from the Sacklers until as recently as 2019 and the Serpentine Sackler gallery in Hyde Park didn't change its name to Serpentine North until 2021.

When, in 1987 - aged 73, Arthur Sackler died of a heart attack, his nephew Richard took over (once he'd negotiated a big and hugely dysfunctional family) Purdue Pharma and the drug the Sacklers would then become most associated with was OxyContin. It began its life as a niche drug for terminal cancer patients and that's, quite clearly, where it should have stayed.

But it didn't. Richard Sackler pushed it just as illegal drug dealers push their wares. He'd been warned of the potential for abuse but he expertly sidestepped concerns and made excuses before going on to use emotional and controversial language to promote the drug. By this point, Purdue Pharma are operating like a pyramid scheme or even a cult and that's where Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny) comes in.

There's a lot of young, attractive, quite often blonde women (Edie calls them 'Purdue Malibu Barbies) driving round in Porsches and using their looks and their guile to persuade pharmacists to buy (and sell) their OxyContin. Or even threatening to run over people and crush their skulls if they stand in their way. This reminded me of the way Donald Trump has lots of young blonde women speaking on his behalf. He thinks everyone's as weak as him and will simply fall for a pretty face.

Sadly, a significant number of people are that weak and we soon see Purdue pushers like Shaeffer, her ambitious protege Molly Dover (Maddy Hills), and the woman who recruited Shaeffer, Britt Hufford (Dina Shihabi) living high on the hog, touring pharmacies, using aggressive marketing spiel, and even handing out cuddly toys designed to look Oxycontin pills. You quite often see teddy bears at the scenes of untimely deaths but people normally at least wait until after the death. It will get far worse later on when a man dressed as an Oxycontin cuddly toy fucks another man up the arse during an orgy in Miami.

They manage to bring some big names on board. There's sleazy Dr Tim Cooper (Johnny Sneed) who expects more than just a cuddly toy from the girls as reward for doing business with them but most importantly of all there's Dr Curtis Wright (show co-creator Noah Harpster) who begins as "the one guy who gives a shit" about the dangers of OxyContin before eventually approving the drug.

The Sacklers had worked Wright very effectively. They'd used the MICE technique on him and it had worked. MICE standing for money, intelligence, coercion, and ego. If you can work some, or all, of these features into your psychological seduction of a person you can sway them to do your bidding.

It worked with Wright but it certainly didn't work with Dr Gregory Fitzgibbons (John Ales) who refuses to prescribe OxyContin to anyone who isn't dying or doesn't have cancer. Or isn't dying of cancer. Because he knows how dangerously addictive it is. He calls Schaeffer "a fucking drug dealer with a ponytail" and you can't help warming to his decency in the face of huge pressure.

As OxyContin deaths rise, and addicts start holding up drugstores, and it becomes clearer to more and more people that it's as dangerous as heroin, Richard Sackler realises he's got a big problem on his hands. So he doubles down on it and starts on a programme of utterly unforgivable victim blaming. The drug he is pushing, legally, isn't the problem. It's the people taking it.

But Painkiller doesn't just focus on those at the top and those investigating them. It follows the story of Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), a North Carolina owner of a small family tire (sorry, tyre) business. OxyContin comes into Glen's life as a result of an accident at work that leaves him with terrible back pain but soon he's addicted to it, sneaking out at night to crush pills up and alienating his wife Lily (Caroline Bartczak) and stepson Tyler (Jack Mulhern).

What Painkiller shows is that the Sackler family were, and are, extremely intelligent people but that they were completely amoral. When Edie Flowers first appeared I thought she was too good to be true, everyone has some faults - surely, but as the series progressed and we learned her back story she became the heart of it all.

Touchingly, each episode begins with footage of parents who have lost their children to OxyContin addiction (including Christopher Trejo who died, aged 32, all alone, freezing cold, in a gas station parking lot) and that brings home the severity of OxyContin addiction in a way that perhaps the drama can't fully do.

There's a good soundtrack, quite a druggy one in places, which features the likes of Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Spiritualized, The Velvet Underground, Beastie Boys, The Raconteurs, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Mase, Rick Ross, The Lovin' Spoonful, Bow Wow Wow, Los Del Rio, Deee-Lite, Fleetwood Mac, and Simon & Garfunkel and there are good supporting performances from Tyler Ritter as lawyer John L.Brownlee and Trenna Keating as Deborah Marlowe, a former Purdue employee who was treated no better than shit during her time there.

There's some squeamish stuff (I'm very squeamish), there's some interesting history about smack being stealthily, and with racist intention, introduced into California in the 1980s and there's even an appearance by Trump's old buddy Rudy Giuliani (played here by Ned Van Zandt). Giuliani, described even by those who employ him as a "swamp creature", works as a lawyer for the Sacklers proving that he is a man who will shill for absolutely anyone if he's paid enough to do so.

The Sacklers, like Trump, had the money to pay this utterly despicable individual and, as again with Trump, they had the money, and power, and influence, to fight ever having to face the same kind of justice the rest of us would. How will it all end up for the Sacklers and, more importantly, their victims? Watch and find out. This is some pain you can run towards.