Dopesick
Kim and I have become addicted to the Hulu series about OxyContin and the Sackler family’s creation of the opioid epidemic in the world over the past twenty-five years. That series is called Dopesick and that term represents the feeling an addict of OxyContin (and any other strong prescription opioid) gets when they are strung out and in desperate need of their next fix. This story fits nicely with our having just listened to the audiobook of Empire of Pain, which more precisely and in greater detail, lays out the entire Sackler family history not just with Purdue Pharma and OxyContin, but all the predecessor companies and drugs that the family foisted on an unsuspecting public. We are on Episode 7 of Season One, so there is one more episode after this and then the season will be over and who knows when that will or won’t get its next installment. One of the reasons I have tended to watch less TV series is this very conundrum. When we find something we really like, we want it to go on forever and we like that to be uninterrupted.
We got all of that for eight seasons with Call the Midwife. Then, we got one season with The Amazing Mrs. Maisel and had to wait for the following seasons, only to get disappointed with the quality of the next season and being frustrated by how long it took to get to that next season. And worse yet, there was the case of The Kaminsky Method, which starred both Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin. Kim and I both loved the show. When the third season came around eventually, they had lost Alan Arkin, who was a big part of the humor of the show. That could be seen coming, but what couldn’t be seen was that the producers would end the show after that third season. That was so disappointing that I think it soured me on starting with a series during its first year and risk being disappointed.
A normal movie runs for about 90-100 minutes. An eight episode season is a bit less than 80 minutes. I’m not sure why I should be so unfulfilled by 80 minutes versus a normal movie, but I suspect we all know the answer. A series is written to induce us to look forward to the next episode and certainly the next season of episodes. Some movies push sequels in their ending, but at least all movies come to some logical conclusion. I have always had a preference for movies, but it is hard not to respect the quality of many of the great series that are being produced these days. Those series are attracting the best and brightest in both on-screen and behind-the-camera talent.
The issue of drug addiction is very foreign to me for many reasons. The most important of those is that I simply have no experience with drugs, nor have I ever. In the same way that I never got into drinking alcohol, I never got into drugs. When I was fourteen, I recall experimenting with a pack of cigarettes and realizing that I didn’t particularly like smoking. I went one step further and tried smoking a pipe for three weeks. I’m not sure what got into me thinking that a pipe would be to my liking, but even with it all seeming so sophisticated, I couldn’t get past the acrid bite of the tobacco in my mouth and the dryness it all created in my throat. And then there was the sour aftertaste that just didn’t want to go away. That same year (it all happened when I first moved to Rome in Uber-permissive Italy of the 1960s), I also got my first serious taste of alcohol. I know I had a Manhattan on the ocean liner across, but the rest is a blur. It was not a blur from drunkenness, but rather a blur from disinterest. Alcohol just never did a thing for me for one reason or another. This carried on right through to today and still, I don’t care for it or need what it gives people.
Tobacco and alcohol have been around for millennia and I was hardly the first young man to confront them both and experiment. But drugs were really another thing altogether. This was the mid-1960s and drugs were in their moment of societal glory. Everybody was doing it. To be fair, what they were doing was probably 90% marijuana, the rest being some combination of upper and downer pills and at the fringes, a trace of Heroin…but that was more myth than reality to those of us of the staunch middle class. Cocaine, crack and various other forms of opioids and hallucinogens were not really on the scene in a big way just yet. Albert Hofmann at Sandoz in Switzerland had invented and pioneered LSD in the 40s and by the 60s, Timothy Leary at Harvard was bringing the stuff into the mainstream. The psychedelic, Peter Maxx fueled vision of the free-loving 60s was all about sucking on a blotter tab of LSD, but to us mere mortals in high school, it seemed like sucking on a stick of dynamite and few were brave enough or stupid enough to take that trip…at least in my circles. But the joints and the hash-laced brownies and the uppers and downers (the veritable valley of the dolls) were in vast supply and in regular everyday use in and around my house when my mother wasn’t there (which was most of the time, her being a UN diplomat at the prime of her high-traveling career).
You see, my sister, Kathy was away at college waiting for Kent State to unfold. That left my other sister, Barb to hold down the fort with me. Barbara had blossomed into an attractive and open-minded young woman who had shifted from the gaze of the nuns at Marymount School to the devil-may-care existence at the Overseas School of Rome. That’s when she hooked up with Tony, the lead singer of one of the big local European rock bands called Free Love. That sounds like a stereotypical name for the era, but that was the group’s name and their top single of the day was something called Fresh Garbage (a cute little ditty about looking beneath your little morning and seeing those things you hadn’t quite consumed….). I would return from Notre Dame International Preparatory School for Boys and the watchful eye of the Brothers of the Holy Cross only to find a large plastic bowl on our coffee table with all those common drugs and related paraphernalia for ingesting them…free for the taking and using compliments of the Free Love. I must be a contrarian at heart because that was enough to put me off of them from the first moment. I was simply too busy getting high from riding my motorcycle through the streets of Rome, back and forth to my school on the Via Aurelia.
So, there you have it. As hard as it is to believe of someone of my age, I got all the way through high school in Rome in the late 60s and college in liberal Ithaca in the early to mid 70s without ever taking so much as a puff on the dragon. At some point that becomes a matter of personal pride and it becomes a mantra. I actually never even felt any peer pressure to dip into the subculture and try any of it, unlike what all the movies seem to imply. And then it was off to New York for work and a whole new kind of success-driven high. As life shifted from the transitional 70s into the Disco “Stayin’ Alive” 80s, Blow came front and center. I remember asking in 1990 of a girlfriend who loved her white wine, whether she had ever tried cocaine. She explained that she had once. I said that must have meant she didn’t like it. Au contrair. She explained that she had liked it so much that it scared her to avoid it.
So, as distant as I feel to anything remotely resembling being Dopesick, I am fascinated by the phenomenon and highly recommend the series and the book to understand whatever portion of the phenomenon you missed along the way.