Make it Stop! Hollywood’s Irritating Addiction to Big Pharma Villains

The new Netflix series "Painkiller" rehashes a myopic storyline

Have you heard? Netflix just released an original series called Painkiller. Apparently, it really sticks it to Big Pharma! Take that, fat cats! 

Kind of like how Hulu’s Dopesick stuck it to the fat cats. Or Sweet Girl. Or The Old Guard. Or Mission: Impossible 2.

Even yours truly produced something of an anti drug company feature film. Forget cocaine and superhero sequels, Hollywood’s biggest addiction might be big pharma villains. 

From cinematography to story structure and editing, the entertainment industry innovates in countless ways. But when creators address hot-button issues, their villains, viewpoints and stories usually conform to the monoculture’s expectations. So often they overlook great swaths of the human experience, zero in on a tiny corner and rehash it ad nauseam. 

Big Pharma, bad! 

We get it. 

But there’s more to the story than that. 

It’s like studio execs grab their story ideas from the same pile of magazines that sits atop mid century modern coffee tables from Silver Lake to SoHo. Painkiller is based on a piece from (surprise!) The New Yorker. 

You can trace the origins of many other shows and films back to The New Yorker and its cousins New York Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. And of course, there’s the rest of the bicoastal family including Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wired, and GQ. 

Inventing Anna came from the pages of New York Magazine

It reminds me of my days producing hourlong specials at ABC News in New York. Countless on-screen pieces originated from a similar collection of print sources. Sometimes it seemed like the Gray Lady could have received “story by” credits for every third piece aired at 147 Columbus Avenue. 

Although the myopia and smugnorance of such “New York” publications often drives me nuts, there’s no mystery why they’re fodder for so much on-screen entertainment. Great writing, great characters, and lots of scandal, all framed to appeal to lefty sensibilities. 

Even I love a good New Yorker piece. I actually have my eye on one surprisingly heterodox story that would make a great film—which one? I’ll never tell! 

However, maybe my secrecy is misplaced because the plot and the villains run afoul of the monoculture rulebook so no studio would bring it to the screen. The poor writer had to know there was almost no chance of scoring a film deal. 

Imagine if producers in network news and entertainment took a break from consuming their usual source material. Imagine if, for one year, they avoided any outlet with “New York” in the title, and filled in the gap with new perspectives. 

If producers read, say, The Wall Street Journal, they might learn about some of the ways those science followers at the federal government contributed to America’s opioid crisis. 

Recently, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf ripped drug makers for failing to develop nonaddictive nonopiod pain medications. What Califf didn’t mention, notes Charles L. Hooper, is how the FDA undermined a nonaddictive nonopiod pain medication called Toradol. 

If producers read Reason (my former employer), they could follow Jacob Sullum’s decades-long coverage of drugs and addiction. 

Sullum has little tolerance for Hollywood mythology, which often goes something like this: A new drug emerges, and it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It’s so addictive it transforms regular, well-functioning people into dead-eyed addicts. And there, presiding over the carnage, stands the bloodless profiteer—Big Pharma!

In this takedown of Dopesick, Sullum points out the many problems with that story. 

Dopesick casts Purdue Pharma (one of Hollywood’s favorite villains) in the role of the evil profiteer. The company’s infamous product, OxyContin, plays the powerful new drug that’s spreading addiction across the land.

But just how new is this new drug? 

Turns out oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin, had long been available in products like Percodan and Percocet before Purdue introduced an extended-release version of the drug in 1996. 

And how does Dopesick depict pain patients? 

We never see a single patient whose life was, on balance, improved by prescription opioids, although the miniseries alludes to the possibility that such people might exist. The resulting impression is that patients who take opioids for pain typically regret it, which is the opposite of reality.

Sullum amasses many studies and surveys that suggest it’s relatively rare for patients to morph into addicts. For instance, a 2018 BMJ study that tracked 568,612 patients who took prescription pain medication following surgery found that only 1 percent showed signs of “opioid misuse.”

And don’t you dare pipe up for patients struggling with chronic pain! 

In Dopesick’s telling, those people are merely falling for Big Pharma’s slick marketing tactics. 

Sullum writes:

When a Dopesick character describes opioid prescriptions as a humane response to people in pain, decries the cruelty of denying them treatment, or talks about the importance of distinguishing between use and abuse of opioids, he is inevitably portrayed as an industry flack or pawn. 

Hollywood’s anti corporate zeal can grow so fierce that producers overlook underdosed pain patients like wheelchair-bound Seán Clarke-Redmond who was struggling with ALS when I interviewed him for a documentary short.

“The pain can go so deep,” he told me, “it feels like it’s right down to the bone.”

Doesn’t he deserve relief?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for bashing Big Pharma baddies when they deserve it. My wife and I did some of that in our 2018 feature Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn. 

The film shines a light on eminent domain abuse and cronyism. Big Pharma (represented by Pfizer) locked arms with Big Government to bulldoze a blue collar community in Connecticut, and the Supreme Court signed off on it.

Different versions of the cronyism story are always unfolding, and what they often reveal is that government action lies at the heart of vast amounts of cruelty. Pfizer’s CEO could have been greedier than a thousand Gordon Gekkos, but all that greed couldn’t destroy the Fort Trumbull neighborhood. Only the force of government could do that. 

Little Pink House shows how all kinds of well-meaning people can slip into delusion, and become bullies. If producers in entertainment and media embraced new perspectives, they might discover heroes and villains with more complexity and nuance.

By peering behind their blindspots, they’d discover more interesting stories and get closer to the truth.

Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.