OxyContin was sold in pharmacies in the United States without problems. It was a powerful pain reliever. It calmed the pain. Its manufacturer, the Sackler family, billed about 3,000 million dollars annually thanks to this drug. But OxyContin was not clean wheat. It was a very powerful opiate. After consuming just a few doses, its users were hooked.
The well-known photographer Nan Goldin, who portrayed New York in the 70s and 80s, was one of the victims of OxyContin. She “she injured a wrist in 2014 and was prescribed this medicine. When she left the hospital, she was already addicted and was about to suffer an overdose, ”explains filmmaker Laura Poitras in a videoconference interview with La Vanguardia.
With Golin’s story as the common thread, Poitras has directed the documentary Beauty and Pain that delves into the havoc caused by OxyContin, the business of the Sackler family –also known for its philanthropy– and Golin’s fight to expose the dynasty that manufactured and marketed this killer drug that has already caused half a million deaths in the United States.
La belleza y el dolor, which opens this Friday in Spanish cinemas, won the Golden Lion at the last Venice Festival and now starts as a favorite to win the Oscar for best documentary, a category in which it competes with Fire of Love and Navalny
Poitras is aware that “for Europeans, it is difficult to understand how OxyContin came to be sold so easily in the United States, because opium is known to be addictive and you have to be careful. Although on occasion it may be necessary, it must be provided with the utmost caution. To try to understand it, you have to go back to the mid-90s “when Purdue Pharma, the Sackler company, saw that the Oxycodone patent was going to expire and that it would lose a lot of money, so it created another drug, OxyContin.”
The FDA, the regulator that grants the licenses, authorized its sale “without stating on the label the true addictive impact of this new medicine.” Later, “the Sacklers talked to the doctors and convinced them that, even though it was an opiate, OxyContin was safe. Since it had the go-ahead from the FDA, doctors started prescribing it. They gave it for cases that would have been cured with a simple aspirin. The Sacklers made a list of the doctors who prescribed this medicine and bribed them with trips and vacations, ”says Poitras, who met Nan Goldin in 2014 and decided to tell her story in 2019.
This is how the opiate crisis began in the United States, which has already claimed 500,000 deaths: “In the early 2000s it was noticed that many users became addicted, overdosed and died. The first affected were white people from the rural world with limited economic resources. There were people who got hooked on OxyContin and when no one prescribed it anymore, they became addicted to other drugs like fentanyl, which is much stronger than heroin and very dangerous.
Why did the US government allow this serious crisis? Poitras attributes it to the fact that “American society is capitalist, without a public health system and allows pharmaceutical companies to get rich without seeing the damage they cause.” And so it is, because the Sacklers got off scot-free: “Unfortunately, nothing important happened to them. With his campaign, Goldin managed to get some museums, not all, to withdraw his name as benefactors, but they have not been criminally responsible. Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy and is trying to reach an agreement with its creditors. Justice has not been done”, concludes Poitras.
