1/3/2024 0 Comments Dope sick next episode![]() ![]() He's one of the central characters, a doctor who sees his patients becoming addicted in droves. MARTIN: And it's - of course, it's a marvelous cast. MARTIN: So the series creates characters, but I take it these are based on people that you really reported on. Some documents were leaked to us, but then others were just part of these very in-depth legal filings from attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts that we were also able to pull from. They are the criminals, you know, not us.Īnd so there was just - as we were working on this show, more and more documents were coming out. ![]() We have Richard Sackler saying, you know, when it first comes up that it's - that crime has, you know, gone through the roof in Appalachia, you know, it's him saying, hammer the abusers. We interviewed former employees at Purdue, former sales reps. And the show really unravels the very many different threads, and they're all pulled from the statement of facts in the 2007 settlement agreement. And they have pleaded guilty twice, first in '07 and again more recently in 2020, to breaking the law, to lying about the dangers of the drugs and to misbranding it. Is this true? Is that - was it, in fact, marketed in that way, in a deceptive way that misled prescribers about the effects of the drug? MARTIN: You know, obviously the series is fiction, but your book was not. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) He said less than 1%. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Less than 1% would become addicted to Ox圜ontin. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) He said less than 1% became addicted. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) That was the key to the whole sales pitch. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) And did he tell you what percentage of patients became addicted? UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) No, sir, I had not. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Had you ever heard of a non-addictive opioid? UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) The sales rep said the drug was different because it was basically non-addictive. There's a scene early in the series where doctors describe what sales representatives told them about the drug. It shows how aggressively Ox圜ontin was marketed to doctors who were prescribing it for legitimate pain. It connected the dots for people who aren't aware of the story. MARTIN: And that's what your book did it. And still, I think a lot of folks don't really understand how it is we got here. The problem only got worse during the pandemic. And what it mainly just makes me ache for is the fact that we have an 88% treatment gap in America, which means that people with opioid-use disorder, only 10 to 12% of them got treatment in the last year. MACY: So many families that I've gotten to know, so many people that I've met who are in jail because of crimes they committed because of their addictions that began, many of them, with Ox圜ontin. And when you see a number like that, when you hear a number like that, what is it - what comes to mind? You have been reporting on this for years. And most of those deaths were from opioids. That's according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. That's the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period. It shows that a record number of Americans died last year from drug overdoses, more than 93,000 people. MARTIN: You know, I was just looking at the preliminary data released by the Centers for Disease Control. Beth Macy is also one of the executive producers, and she's with us now to tell us more about it.īeth Macy, welcome. That book was part of the source material for an eight-episode series premiering on Hulu on October 13. How do you get the country to pay attention to a public health crisis that's been killing people in record numbers - a crisis everybody knows about, but that seems almost impossible to stop? Could a TV series help? Journalist Beth Macy is the author of "Dopesick," the critically acclaimed 2018 bestseller that shed light on the origins and the course of this country's opioid epidemic, focusing on a small town in Virginia and moving through central Appalachia. ![]()
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