Through candid interviews with her family and Kolodny, Boyle examines exactly why—and how common—this kind of escalating dosing happens. One incredibly impactful sequence includes an interview with an ex-sales rep for Purdue Pharma who explains how the dosing stems from a sales strategy in which the company targeted family doctors and general practitioners, pushing them to subscribe to higher and higher doses of the medicine. Even those already aware of these kinds of corrupt practices will find it maddening to hear it laid out so plainly—and to realize just how pervasive Purdue’s marketing schemes have shaped the way modern medicine is practiced in this country.
Boyle structures her film as if it were a home video, and her use of tracking forward and tracking backward through the story of the sisters and the crisis is extremely effective. Especially when coupled with the way she uses archival footage to show the changing ways news media covered, at first, the so-called miracle of opioid medicine, and then the nation in crisis. She contrasts some of the drastic language that puts the blame on “criminals” and “abusers” with home video of her teenage sister in happier days.
Perhaps the best use of this technique comes after a montage showing how misinformation in a PSA produced by Purdue Pharma—what Kolodny calls “brilliant marketing disguised as education”—gets disseminated throughout news coverage, Boyle cuts to home video footage of her sister discussing how she is studying mass communications. “It’s all about the media and how it affects us. It’s so interesting,” Jordan says.
Boyle is wise enough to know that she is crafting a piece of media herself, and never attempts to shy away from her personal connection to this crisis. Although she balances the personal story of her family with interviews with experts, there is a righteous anger to all the facts and history presented. That all the interviews—including with survivors from around highly affected states like Oklahoma and West Virginia—were filmed during the Trump administration, aka the era of “fake news,” also adds a further layer of despair to the entire documentary.
But when nearly 50,000 people a year in this country die from this crisis, a crisis whose roots are found in the greed of one company, one family, and that has continued to escalate under the governance of four different presidents, maybe objectivity is a luxury that we as a nation can no longer afford.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46apaimqaK8tr%2BMrKCsrJWneq671aKcZqqVq7amw4xrZ2tr