Alex Gibney’s two-part docuseries The Crime of the Century reframes the opioid crisis as a crime of fraudulent marketing and callous corporate greed
The origin of America’s opioid crisis – the ludicrously profitable proliferation of addictive pain medications whose abuse killed nearly half a million Americans between 2000 and 2019 – arguably comes down to a single sentence. In 1996, the drug company Purdue Pharma, then owned and controlled by Mortimer and Raymond Sackler and their heirs, began selling the opioid drug OxyContin. (The family of a third brother, Arthur Sackler, sold their shares before OxyContin’s introduction.) The highly addictive medication was designed for people with severe pain, such as cancer patients, but went to market as a moderate pill for chronic pain sufferers, complete with a succinct, misleading seal of approval from the Food and Drug Administration: “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.”
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