Barry Meier: Last News

New Yorker article, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and Barry Meier’s book, “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic.” It retells the opioid crisis from several different perspectives, including billionaire Richard Sackler (Broderick) and his team at Purdue Pharma (Sackler has denied responsibility for the crisis); Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba), a lawyer working for the US attorney’s office in Roanoke who’s investigating the drug OxyContin; Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), a family man with a small business who gets hooked on OxyContin after he’s injured at work; and Shannon Shaeffer (West Duchovony), a new recruit to the Purdue sales team who begins having doubts. “Back in 2003, I was working at the New York Times and we got a tip that there was this new drug called OxyContin that was running wild on the streets of all these small towns,” Meier, a consulting producer on the show, told The Post.

Aramide Tinubu While Fentanyl now dominates headlines as the drug wreaking havoc on our society, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was OxyContin that led conversations about the impact of overprescribed opioids. Formulated, produced, marketed and sold by the family-run organization Purdue Pharma, Oxy quickly grew in popularity because it was marketed as a safe, “non-addictive” opioid. Oxy was then pushed onto patients through respected healthcare professionals who were misinformed about the drug and profited greatly from prescribing it.

Netflix's latest limited series is a fictionalised re-telling of a drugs crisis which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans since the late 90s.

Netflix original series to become a summer hit looks set to be the drug drama Painkiller, fronted by Matthew Broderick – you can find episode details below.The series takes on the ever-headline-making prescription drugs crisis that continues to grip America and other parts of the world. Broderick plays a slick pharmaceutical executive, Richard Sackler, while Uzo Aduba’s Edie Flowers is the government lawyer set on taking him down.An official synopsis for Painkiller reads: “A fictionalized retelling of events, Painkiller is a scripted limited series that explores some of the origins and aftermath of the opioid crisis in America, highlighting the stories of the perpetrators, victims, and truth-seekers whose lives are forever altered by the invention of OxyContin.“An examination of crime, accountability, and the systems that have repeatedly failed hundreds of thousands of Americans, Painkiller is based on the book Pain Killer by Barry Meier and the New Yorker magazine article The Family That Built an Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe.”The first season of Painkiller comprises six one hour episodes that chart the battle between the good guys (Flowers and the Feds) and the big bad (Sackler and his Pharma company).As with many TV series on Netflix, the series will have its entire season released in one go as of Thursday, August 10.

The first look pics from Netflix‘s upcoming Painkiller series have just been released.