In a bright room on a suburban US college campus, a group of students are watching gleefully as a speaker promises a “glorious, beautiful revolution”. The speaker, a young sales representative for Purdue Pharma, is outlining a vision of “life transformation”: a blueprint for healing America’s physical and spiritual ills. This is not a religious gathering, nor a political rally. It is the launch of OxyContin: a small white pill that will go on to decimate hundreds of thousands of American lives.Netflix’s new drama Painkiller, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, tells the story of how Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick) took advantage of a broken healthcare system to build a vast pharmaceutical empire through their company Purdue Pharma.
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