Dopesick: Hulu’s gripping opioid drama is painful, searing TV

Hulu’s Dopesick is honestly infuriating. And no one involved with the show should take that personally. It’s actually a compliment. Because I can’t remember the last time a show made me this righteously angry.

Maybe HBO’s Chernobyl, which documented the lengths a government might go to cover up an atrocity. But here, it’s almost worse. The case at the heart of this story remains ongoing. In 2021. Nearly 25 years after it started. Watching Dopesick makes me want to protest something. To attend a march. To do anything that might hold someone responsible for this towering deceit, for the dangerous lies that robbed millions of their lives, families, and futures.

It’s true, Dopesick is far from a perfect show. But it’s still one of the most important pieces of television you’ll watch in 2021.

Based on the book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy, the Hulu series follows the story of the rise of Oxycontin, a highly addictive narcotic that would change the face of drug addiction and pain management forever. Initially marketed and sold as a lesser addictive version of its more dangerous opioid cousins, Oxycontin served as the tip of the metaphorical spear of a growing medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the accepted norm.

Salespeople and marketing reps were financially incentivized to get doctors to describe higher doses than their patients needed, and to keep those patients on the medication for longer periods of time than they might otherwise. The FDA allowed the company that produced the drug to bend the rules when it came to warning labels and promises of less frequent addiction. And normal, everyday people had their lives turned upside down, from blue collar workers trying to numb the pain from physically demanding jobs to privileged teens snorting the pills in picturesque cul de sacs.

The end result is a story that’s truly horrifying to watch on virtually every level. Yes, its pacing could use some work, and it has maybe one too many storylines happening at once, but when a series’ message is this on point, well. It’s easy to forgive it a lot.

The show follows a handful of major characters, including a young woman injured while on the job in a Virginia mining town, a local doctor who is forced to reassess his own life and beliefs in the wake of prescribing the drug to others, a pair of dogged investigators determined to bring a seemingly unstoppable pharmaceutical company to justice, and various members of the prestigious Sackler family who helped create the drug in the first place, and who repeatedly chose the promise of increased profits over people’s lives.

Terrible things happen to almost every character the show encourages you as a viewer to care about, and Dopesick doesn’t pull any punches about the myriad ways that Oxycontin abuse can ruin and even end lives.

Unfortunately, the show’s attempt to serve these multiple story arcs, and to balance the multiple time periods in which it takes place, can occasionally be confusing, as follows characters at various points from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s.

Dopesick’s settling rapidly shifts from the board meetings of the influential Sackler family to the halls of the Department of Justice, a small Appalachian medical clinic, and the offices of a medical sales company. And though a sliding title card ostensibly tells you when the events you are about to watch unfurl, there are moments you’ll certainly feel a little lost. (Mostly when it comes to the fact that you’ll see snippets from two different investigations into Purdue Pharmaceuticals happening simultaneously, despite the fact that one chronologically takes place before the other.)

But no matter what time period we’re discussing, the story remains equally horrifying in each.

Maybe this is the sort of story that wasn’t ever going to have a happy or comfortable ending, simply because this isn’t a story that has a definable endpoint. Millions still struggle with opioid addiction and abuse today, and it’s not a scourge that seems to have any end in sight. Perhaps the best we can do is what Dopesick is best at: Telling the story of how we got here, showing empathy for those who, despite their best efforts, fell victim to a drug that literally rewrote their brain chemistry to require more and more of it, and asking for someone, anyone to be held accountable for it.

Maybe one day they will be. Dopesick should at least make more people aware of this history and this struggle – and that’s definitely no small thing.

The first three episodes of Dopesick will premiere on Wednesday, October 13, with new installments arriving weekly thereafter.