HBO - The Crime of the Century (2021) Part 1

There were 487,842 overdose deaths involving opioids from 2000-2019 in the United States. HBO's THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY, a two-part documentary directed by Emmy and Academy Award winner Alex Gibney (HBO's “The Inventor Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” “Going Clear Scientology & the Prison of Belief”), and presented in association with The Washington Post, is a searing indictment of Big Pharma and the political operatives and government regulations that enable over-production, reckless distribution and abuse of synthetic opiates. The film follows the opioid epidemic in the United States, and the political operatives, government regulations and corporations that enable the abuse of opioids, particularly the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma. Exploring the origins, extent and fallout of one of the most devastating public health tragedies of our time, with half a million deaths from overdoses this century alone, the film reveals that America's opioid epidemic is not a public health crisis that came out of nowhere. 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 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. Purdue then aggressively marketed OxyContin to doctors across the country as a safe prescription for chronic pain sufferers, although company never held clinical trials to demonstrate that OxyContin was less addictive or likely to be abused than any other opioid. With the help of whistleblowers, insiders, newly-leaked documents, exclusive interviews and access to behind-the-scenes investigations, and featuring expert input from medical professionals, journalists, former and current government agents, attorneys and pharmaceutical sales representatives, as well as sobering testimony from victims of opioid addiction, Gibney's expose posits that drug companies are in fact largely responsible for manufacturing the very crisis they profit from, to the tune of billions of dollars…and thousands of lives.

Part 1

The opioid crisis has resulted in a country ravaged by corporate greed and betrayed by some of its own elected officials, following the aggressive promotion of OxyContin, a highly addictive drug from family-owned pharmaceutical giant, Purdue Pharma. Purdue worked closely with the FDA to get the highly profitable pain medication approved for wider use, promoting its safety without sufficient evidence, and creating a campaign to redefine pain and how we treat it. When government regulators or Justice Department officials tried to mitigate the wrongdoing, Purdue Pharma and companies like Cardinal-Health that were huge opioid distributors would settle the cases, keep the details private and continue on unabated. As tens of thousands of people succumbed to opioid addiction, the fortunes built by the opiate business became the crime of the century, and the market that OxyContin had opened paved the way for even deadlier prescription drugs. Contributing to Part One of THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY are author Patrick Radden Keefe; opioid specialist Dr. Andrew Kolodny; former Purdue sales rep. Mark Ross; addiction specialist Dr. Anne Lembke; Life Tree pain clinic founder Dr. Lynn Webster; Roy Bosley, whose wife died of an opioid overdose; author and NY Times reporter Barry Meier; primary care physician Dr. Art Van Zee; former Department of Justice official Paul Pelletier; and EMT Giles Sartin.

Full Version Available Upon Request