How ‘Dopesick’ explores the systems that allowed Purdue Pharma to drive the opioid crisis

The Sackler name was once ubiquitous in the halls of the greatest cultural institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, the Louvre.

“I knew their name because of the museum wings, the charitable donations,” Peter Sarsgaard told the Daily News.

“I sort of feel like this mythology around charitable giving and their name, when this came up, I was like, ‘wait, but they’re that family with the philanthropy.’”

Today, the plaques and the donations feel intentional; focus on the generosity and you won’t notice the thousands of people dying from an opioid addiction that Purdue said could never happen. Critics have called it reputation laundering.

“Dopesick,” which premiered Wednesday on Hulu and is based on Beth Macy’s 2018 book “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America," doesn’t care how much money the Sackler family, which has owned Purdue since the 1950s, has donated. It doesn’t care how many museums it funds. It cares about the death toll and the people who looked away as the bodies stacked up.

The limited series weaves multiple narratives and timelines, but creator Danny Strong called the investigation in the U.S. Attorney’s Office the “spine of the show.” There, federal prosecutors Rick Mountcastle (Sarsgaard), Randy Ramseyer (John Hoogenakker) and John Brownlee (Jake McDorman), along with DEA Agent Bridget Meyer (Rosario Dawson), stand alone against Purdue Pharma.

“They had lobbyists,” 50-year-old Sarsgaard, who stars as Mountcastle, the real-life assistant U.S. attorney who led the investigation into Purdue Pharma at the Department of Justice, said. “They’re paying for elections. They had a very loud voice because they have money.”

In 2021, most viewers know that the Sacklers will eventually face liability for the opioid crisis caused by OxyContin, promised to be non-addictive; last month, a federal judge granted the family sweeping immunity from lawsuits in exchange for a $4.3 billion settlement and a promise to sell Purdue Pharma. The Sacklers admitted no wrongdoing and the financial settlement was less than half of the money they made in profit exclusively from opioids.

In the early 2000s, though, when part of “Dopesick” takes place, the Sacklers seemed indestructible.

“This is still going on. The family that created this drug, the Sackler that was the head of the board of directors…they have largely escaped any sort of financial (punishment),” Hoogenakker told The News.

“If you’ve got enough money, you can kind of escape justice in this country.”

It’s not just Purdue that Mountcastle, Ramseyer, Brownlee and Meyer are up against, though. At times, they are fighting their own bosses and colleagues, banging against the loopholes within the institutions and systems that are supposedly in place to stop corporations from harming the public.

“The Sacklers are a family that did this in secret for decades and decades and decades,” McDorman, 35, told The News.

“It’s not enough progress but as long as there are people within the systems and the institutions that hold it to the standard that we all thought it was holding itself to autonomously, it makes the public more aware. It puts more pressure on the systems to actually reform (the companies) to a place that they’re supposed to be.”

Even if you consider $4.3 billion a success, it’s hard to find a happy ending to either “Dopesick” or the opioid crisis, and even harder to find the faith that this won’t happen again with another drug and another pharmaceutical company.

More than 840,000 people have died from a drug overdose since 1999, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And yet for decades, Purdue sold OxyContin on the lie that it was non-addictive, as the FDA, DEA and DOJ brushed it off with a hand wave.

“The people who were supposed to oversee and prevent this criminal company from committing crimes, many of them ended up going to work for them. Literally going to work for them,” Strong told The News.

“This is the ultimate swamp tale of corruption in government by moneyed influence in a completely legal manner.”

An attorney who recently represented the Sacklers did not immediately return a request for comment on the series.

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