Wen 丨 Aver Arsenic
In 2008, Heath Ledger died of a drug overdose, and an autopsy revealed that one of the six drug components in the blood was oxycodone, meaning that Heath Ledger probably had taken extended-release oxycodone before his death: OxyContin, known as "country heroin." The name OxyContin is almost universally known in the United States, and Heath Ledger may be just one of its 400,000 fatal cases.
Heath Ledger
The most abused addictive drug in U.S. history has set off an opioid abuse crisis that has swept the United States for more than two decades. And the biggest medical scandal of this century behind it is still unbroken to this day.
The recent 8-episode limited episode "Addictive Dose" launched by Hulu tells how OxyContin and the Sackler family behind it use lies, fraud and behind-the-scenes peace with government agencies to push ordinary people into the abyss step by step. The painkiller that calms the pain becomes a Pandora's box that causes pain.
When the first episode of "Addictive Dose" was released, the Douban score was 8.7, and with the update of subsequent episodes, the rating rose all the way, and has now reached 9.3 points. "Birdman" Michael Keaton's brash performance undoubtedly adds a lot to it. The gradual rise in word-of-mouth also shows that as the plot unfolds, the series releases a continuous staying power.
Addictive drugs
Before entering the series, it is necessary to introduce the US opioid abuse crisis behind the series.
The English name Ofxick refers to the withdrawal reaction of anesthetics. Anesthetic analgesics such as OxyContin are opioids, namely poppy extracts and derivatives.
Addictive Dose
In the medical community in the 1990s, a fierce wind of attention to pain care was blown, and with pain declared the fifth sign by WHO in 1995, the elimination of pain became a fundamental human right. And the slow-release analgesic Oxycontin stood on this once-in-a-lifetime outlet at the right time.
In 1996, the previous generation of products MeschContin is close to the patent protection period, Purdue company in order to continue to make a profit, the sustained release patent part of MeschContin retained, and then the active ingredient morphine was replaced by oxycodone, a new bottle of old wine, launched an epoch-making star product - OxyContin.
Oxycodone is an effective substance of OxyContin, its analgesicity is 1.5 times that of morphine, and its addictiveness is also stronger than morphine. However, morphine is easily associated with advanced cancer and addictiveness, while oxycodone appears harmless to humans and animals in the eyes of unknown people.
Before the birth of OxyContin, oxycodones had no sustained-release effect, and doctors were very cautious in administering them, only as hospice drugs for advanced cancer. The new drug OxyContin is more ambitious, targeting a larger market: non-cancer chronic moderate to severe pain.
Purdue Pharma gave two selling points: "1% low addiction" and "12-hour sustained release analgesia", these two product settings have no experimental basis to support, but meet the requirements of long-term pain treatment.
The Sackler family behind Purdue Pharmaceuticals understood from the outset that demand was defined by producers. "We don't chase the market, we create the market", they are not pursuing efficacy, but sales; serving not patients who take drugs, but doctors who prescribe drugs.
Purdue Pharmaceutical launched a crazy marketing campaign for doctors, medical representatives to their liking, one-on-one communication with doctors, kickbacks and bribes, doctors were invited to attend pain treatment lectures, lectures not only Purdue sponsored experts in the name of pain research to promote the efficacy, but also provide a variety of pastimes, and paid for by the company. The results of the lectures were immediate, with doctors who attended lectures prescribing more than twice as many OxyContin.
As a result, the legal label of "not addictive" in OxyContin has become a legitimate reason for doctors to indiscriminately prescribe, and gradually occupy the drug market. While the Sacklers were making a lot of money, crime rates rose significantly across the United States, and in 1999 the number of people serving sentences in Virginia jails doubled from 1995.
In the 20 years since the 21st century, more than 800,000 people have died from substance abuse in the United States. The outbreak that began last year has exacerbated the situation, with long social distancing and surging unemployment rates causing many people to relapse into addiction. This trend of abuse has not yet eased.
The structure of the weave of time
The screenwriter did not sell Guanzi, the first episode began, it was straightforward, directly to the point, explaining the birth of OxyContin and the investigation faced by its parent company Purdue Pharmaceutical 10 years later, and the operating details of the Sackler family, a legal addictive product production and marketing company, gradually became clear under the weaving of the timeline of continuous flashback and flashback in the series.
The series has three timelines: the first began in 1996, when OxyContin began to be introduced to the market, the second in 2002, when female DEA agents began investigating the addictiveness of oscontin, and the third in 2006, when three federal prosecutors reopened investigations into oscontin. The three timelines are interspersed with each other, creating a contrasting effect under the comparison of different time dimensions.
For example, in the main line in 2006, three Purdue executives were appealed, and there were no Sackler family members; the next shot cuts back to 2002, where Arthur Sackler stepped back in the background on the pretext of returning to the family, relinquished the position of president, and constantly called to ask about sales performance scenes - the real power is still in the hands of the Sackler family, but the responsibility has long been thrown to others.
The screenwriter cleverly let the audience know about the failure of the investigation in 2002 when the first episode restarted the investigation in 2006, which made the DEA female detectives running through the 2002 timeline of the whole series carry a sense of righteousness. Every flash of hope in her eyes reflected a fatalistic bleakness. This also secretly tells the audience that shaking this huge Goliath is a task that cannot be achieved overnight.
Hell is open, and demons are on earth. In 2002, the female detective investigation ended in failure and family breakdown, and Oscondine continued to sell well in the market; the 2006 investigation ended with the dismissal of the prosecutor who led the investigation, and although Purdue was forced to pay $600 million in mediation fees, the Sackler family behind it was unscathed. By the time the series ended, when the three timelines finally converged in 2006, both investigations had been declared over, while Oscontin was still on sale and the Sacklers were still at large.
This is reminiscent of the "Narcos" series, where the formal victory of the DEA at the end of each season is only to help the drug lords carry out an internal power change, complete a metabolism, a shell, and then the devil is more powerful than before.
The lamentations of the countrymen
In 1996, this timeline focuses on a coal mining town in West Virginia, telling how the originally peaceful life was broken by Oscondine and then swallowed up by the abyss at the bottom of the chain of rich and poor after the hollowing out of industry.
Michael Keaton plays Phoenix, a country doctor, and Betsy, a young miner girl, both of whom have tried to start a new life with OxyContin, but are unexpectedly swept away by the turbulent whirlpool.
Phoenix's transformation from a kind doctor to a capitalist coercive accomplice, and the girl Betsy's step-by-step depravity to death due to drug addiction, are the two most powerful moments in the series.
The old doctor Phoenix was once a college student in the city, because his deceased wife had the ideal of serving the countryside, came to the countryside together, lived here for forty years, delivered 214 children, and this life-changing decision was made by his wife. Deep down, he has a homesickness for the city. The medical representative who came to the clinic to promote OxyContin allowed him to regain contact with the city, and after several trials, he chose to trust the medical representative.
Speaking at a lecture arranged by Purdue, backlit footage captures the moment when he is overwhelmed by applause from the audience, and the praises reach an addictive threshold that makes him lose his judgment and enjoy dancing with Mephistopheles. So he increased the prescription dose, and he found himself an accomplice of the capitalists.
But soon he was a victim of the capitalists—he himself was addicted to OxyContin.
Betsy was a young coal miner, an obedient child, who had been reluctant to tell her conservative parents about her homosexual status. After an underground accident that hit her back, she didn't want to take a leave of absence, so she took OxyContin prescribed by Phoenix. She agreed with her girlfriend to leave the mountain and start a new life.
But Oscondine made it impossible for her to control herself. In order to buy medicine, she began stealing, losing her temper, breaking with her family, and selling her body for $30. Eventually, the night before she finally made up her mind to quit treatment, she died of a drug overdose. Say goodbye to her pain forever.
The timing of the two people taking OxyContin is very interesting, they began to take the drug, it is the moment when they faintly see the dawn of a new life, or rather, oscondine awakens their deep inner secret unwillingness to the status quo. Betsy became addicted when she made up her mind to leave the mine, while Doctor Phoenix took it and was preparing to meet her new love life, "Don't use pain as an excuse to refuse to live well" when she was preparing for her new love life.
Another drug-addicted girl, Elizabeth Ann, told Phoenix that her favorite book was Vanity Fair and that she wanted to be a novelist. Escape this mountain, shrouded in conservative religion, and join another class.
What they hope to do is to remove all pain and bondage.
Pain is an appendage of the past, a part of life, and the new life outside makes the pain that has become a part of the body suddenly unbearable. A new life must require a free flesh.
However, I thought that after the pain was eliminated, I would usher in peace and freedom, but what I waited for was numbness. Say goodbye to pain, and say goodbye to other senses of touch. At the same time as the loss of the ability to feel sensations, the nervous system is altered by chemicals. The pain is gone, but in exchange for all-round pain.
To eliminate pain is to kill a part of the self in a sense. Kierkegaard said, "Since my early childhood, a sad barb has been stuck in my heart. As long as it's stuck there, I'm a cynical person — as soon as it's gone, I'm going to die."
Without pain, I am no longer me.
In short, these characters in the series have their own three-dimensional levels. After all, they were not molded into perfect victims, and they were both parties to Faust's deal.
An addictive dose that cannot be escaped
The series begins with a ten-year-old hearing, intending to inform the audience of the direction of the plot in advance. Therefore, the suspense in the play is not the result of the event, but how the event can deteriorate step by step to the final result.
Its effect is like "A Murder Case Publicized beforehand", although the outcome of the matter has long been known, but when the tragic truth is gradually spread in front of the audience, it is still inevitable to be moved, and at the same time, it is chilling to find that the reason why this addictive drug is popular, everyone can not escape the blame, and the achievement of the addictive dose is the complicity of all the bite points in the entire chain.
Like in the 2019 episode "Chernobyl", the most frightening thing is that everyone knows that the whole system is working in the wrong way, but everyone is still doing their own part of the division of labor in the system.
Everyone is not the one who ultimately kills the addict, but everyone adds their own dose to it. The threshold of the dose of addiction to death, which is missing, can not be reached.
Prosecutors in the show mentioned that when a doctor was arrested for selling OxyContin to an 11-year-old, he said "thank you" to the police, saying he would not have stopped. In the process of promoting OxyContin, people seem to have entered a game that cannot be freely withdrawn, although involuntarily, but the heavy inertia makes them unable to stop, and the occasional self-blame is quickly overwhelmed by incentive mechanisms and considerable rewards, incentive-feedback revolving doors, making these people run endlessly like hamsters in a cage.
A civilized society full of various feedback mechanisms is itself a state of captivity. As Buñuel said in "The Angel Of Annihilation", after waking up from a dream, no one can leave the room, and even if there is no physical coercive resistance, the flesh will be imprisoned in self-evident rules, without an exit.
Knowing the dark ending ahead, but irretrievably wrapped in inertia and slowly approaching the ending, this sense of powerlessness and oppression makes the series shrouded in double despair.
Even more frustrating is the fact that so far no one in the Sakkol family has been charged.
Before the second lawsuit in 2019, the Sackler family had already shed its shell and left a shell company. Purdue's bankruptcy filing automatically terminates all lawsuits, judgments or appeals against the company.
In Forbes magazine in 2020, the Sackler family remains one of the richest families in the United States.
The person who made the cage of this hamster is still insensitively guarding his wealth and enjoying his old age.