Netflix's 'Painkiller' EP Says America's 'Worst Addiction' Isn't Drugs

An exclusive first look at Netflix's latest limited drama series, Painkiller, gives a harrowing insight into the nation's opioid crisis and the toll it has taken on families around the country. Watch the exclusive sneak peek in the video above.

The six-episode series, which stars Emmy-award winner Uzo Aduba, Matthew Broderick and Taylor Kitsch tells a fictionalized version of how the opioid crisis happened and its tragic aftermath, particularly decisions made by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that owned it. The series premiered on Netflix on August 10.

Painkiller's producers wanted to not only paint a picture of the devastating effects of the crisis, but also to understand why pointing the finger at one man—in this case, Purdue Pharma's chairman, Richard Sackler (Broderick)—might not be the solution to preventing a crisis like this from happening again.

For executive producer Alex Gibney, researching how OxyContin was marketed to the nation was eye-opening.

"What was interesting to me about it was that the crisis wasn't something that just happened, like a hurricane or a flood, it was something that was manufactured, by companies looking to make an egregious profit with a drug that had some valuable medical uses, but when inappropriately prescribed, leads to massive addiction," he said in an Electronic Press Kit interview provided to Newsweek by Netflix.

"We all know about the drug OxyContin, which is the drug that was so rapaciously abused. But really, the worst addiction here is the addiction to money, and these outsized profits and that that somehow could excuse everything," Gibney continued. "So long as you were pursuing profit and returning money to your investors, it excused everything. It's that addiction to money-making, at the highest level, that blinded everybody to everything else. You can see it not only at the level of the Sacklers but also the level of the sales people."

Gibney added that while the narrative of OxyContin was well known, people seemed to turn a blind eye, even in the highest levels of government.

"We know what happened, we just didn't bother to really pay attention, and it's aided and abetted by the most powerful forces in the United States, and I'm talking about now the Department of Justice failing to properly prosecute, I'm talking about Congress failing to properly legislate—that's, in a way, what really shocked me," Gibney said.

OxyContin began sweeping the nation thanks to a concerted marketing campaign to health care providers by Purdue Pharma in the late 1990s. The company was also able to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for OxyContin to go on the market after providing a misleading description of the drug claiming it was less addictive than other opioids.

Sackler even encouraged Purdue executives to push a narrative that OxyContin was only a problem for "criminal" addicts and the crisis had not thing to do with the drug itself.

Since 1999, more than 600,000 have died from an opioid overdose, with an estimated 1.2 million expected to die by the end of the decade in the U.S. and Canada unless urgent intervention takes place, according to 2022 research by the Stanford-Lancet Commission.

The Sackler family has been ordered by courts around the country to pay billions in compensation to victims and their families.

In the clip provided exclusively to Newsweek, Aduba stars as Edie Flowers, a determined investigator for the U.S. Attorney's Office who is worried about a new opioid spreading across the country, OxyContin.

The scene shows Flowers' boss, U.S. Attorney John Brownlee (played by Tyler Ritter) warning her against taking on a company as big as Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company that introduced the controversial drug to the market.

Flowers—who is a "composite character" of real people involved in the investigation into the opioid crisis, according to showrunners and writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster—stops him in his tracks and makes it clear why the issue is personal for her.

"They are doing the exact same thing as every crack dealer on every corner in America, except they're getting rewarded for it, getting rich off of it, and my brother is in a prison cell right now, rotting." Flowers passionately tells him. "What is the difference? They know they are killing people. They know it."

In EPK interviews conducted prior to the current SAG (Screen Actors Guild) and WGA (Writers Guild of America) strikes, the actors and writers spoke about why a show like Painkiller was so important to make.

"What we learn in this show is that it touches everyone...the families, your job, your life are the bigger side effects of drug abuse. Those are some of the things that aren't put on the bottle," Aduba said in an interview provided to Newsweek by Netflix. "She takes a story like this very personally. Because she has herself been impacted by abuse in her family."

Aduba praised the writers for being able to tell the stories of everyone in this limited series and how a crisis like this happens because of the actions of more than just one person.

"Houses don't build themselves, and though the Sacklers are the foundation, there are a lot of bricks that went into building a world that allowed for all of this to happen," Aduba explained, adding, "We get to really understand how something like this is able to go from being a snowflake to an avalanche."

Broderick conceded that Sackler was an "unusual role" for him but that he was drawn to the project because it was "a great story. I don't like talking about it that way because it's a tragic story. But it's very interesting, and I think it's important for people to know about it. And to know about what happened to these towns and this sort of horror show that has happened, how it came about."

The writers teamed with a number of producers, including Gibney, Eric Newman and Peter Berg, who also directed all six episodes, when they realized they were working on similar projects about the opioid crisis.

Fitzerman-Blue and Harpster had separately secured the rights to Barry Meier's book, Pain Killer, while Gibney had optioned Patrick Radden Keefe's New Yorker article "The Family That Built the Empire of Pain."

"You had a bunch of people, all of whom were dedicated to telling this story, and it made much more sense to join forces in a kind of synergistic fashion than to go our separate ways. And that became a party," Gibney explained.

Fitzerman-Blue and Harpster have a clear idea of what they hope viewers will take away from the series and the real-life experiences that inspired it.

"What we hope an audience takes away from this show is fury; we want them to throw their television out the window by the time they finish this show and realize that there were moments when this could've been stopped, it could've gone a different way," Harpster said in the EPK interview. "I hope that people see that this could've been stopped, and it will hold people in the future accountable for their actions."

Fitzerman-Blue added: "We want our audience to know what happened, we want our audience to be captivated, and we want them to be f****** pissed."