It starts with the kids. They’re haunted by abandonment and other fears they’re too young to fully process, and they’ve witnessed the toll their parents’ addictions have taken on them. These opening moments of BBC Three’s Addiction: America’s Opioid Crisis set the stage for a harrowing account of parent-child bonding from hell.
This crisis stems from a position of greed. The pharmaceutical industry systematically tries to overuse these drugs to treat pain. The film outlines industry strategies for attracting potential patients and convincing healthcare professionals to fully embrace its use.
Drugmaker Purdue doubled its sales force with the launch of its star brand, OxyContin. Your salespeople are trained to fill sales pitches with false assumptions, exaggerated promises, and flawed science. Founded in the ’90s, Purdue also got its message across with a clever ad campaign touting a safer, more reliable painkiller without unwanted side effects. They promise that “less than 1% of users will become addicted”. Over the next 15 years, opioid addiction rates increased by 900%. As one interviewee explains at the beginning of the film, “No other drug kills as many people as opioids.”
This documentary examines the dire effects of these rising addiction rates on individuals and societies, and relentlessly exposes the chief engineer behind the epidemic. The film argues that if these companies are directly responsible for this scourge of death and destruction, then they should bear the cost of addressing it.
The filmmakers speak to a variety of characters representing the entire pandemic, from the grieving parent whose child overdoses to death, the addict who struggles daily to stay clean and live a productive life, the overwhelmed drug counselor… …recovery as drug enforcement officials struggle to stem a wave of opioid shipments by drug cartels, and a former Purdue sales representative who exposes the company’s shameful practices.
With great anger and a sense of urgency, “Addiction: America’s Opioid Crisis” fearlessly confronts the traumatic aftermath of the opioid epidemic—from devastated communities across America to leaving mourners or dying people.
Directed by: Darren Conway
