One moment he is the ever-attentive country physician, happily working 16-hour days, making night calls to elderly patients with dementia to ensure all their daily meds have been duly taken, attending to the injuries of his coal-mining patients, and often delivering their children.įinnix is a man of simple pleasures he enjoys fishing with members of the Finch Creek community of which he forms the responsible backbone, until the devil invades the town in the form of Ox圜ontin. The mechanism by which Finnix becomes addicted to Ox圜ontin happens in a flash that straddles two episodes. This distillation of Finnix cannot be taken as a “more universal truth,” even in a meager sense, as we shall explore. Finnix himself becomes addicted, getting high on his patients’ diverted supply. We only meet three of his patients in detail - Mallum, his ex-miner patient Jonas, and a young woman named Elizabeth-Anne - all of whom become addicts. He is emblematic of a problematic prescriber. Finnix is the epitome of a “composite character” into whom most material and several arcs are heavy-handedly stuffed. I could achieve a more universal truth a higher truth."ĭr. I could use as many anecdotes as I wanted. "By fictionalizing, I wouldn't be stuck to the truth of one person's life. “If I made these characters composite characters, I get way more of these anecdotes into these arcs with fewer characters and get more truthful stories into the show," Strong said. Finnix and Dever’s Betsy Mallum, whose characters were explained by Strong in a 2021 interview with NPR, in which he praised the merits of not being “stuck to the truth.” But this organizing principle proves thoroughly dizzying, obfuscating the “human interest” element that makes up much of Macy’s book.īecause the series is also determined to paint physicians and patients in an antagonistic relationship, we end up with just two fictional representations of “doctors” and “patients” - Keaton’s Dr. The time-leaps throughout this eight-part series are anchored on the discoveries of law enforcement as it digs deep into Purdue Pharma. As depicted in the series, the Sacklers are not a family, but a business, through and through. The Sackler family is separated into those who have “A Shares” and those with “B Shares” in Purdue - a split that divides the heirs and sees them wrestle over profits. Rather than the devoutly religious and close-knit Mallum family, who earn their daily bread through hard work in West Virginia’s mines, the Hulu series has the Sacklers sitting down to meet at opposite ends of a table, as opposed to holding hands in prayer. It is this type of dangerous, Ox圜ontin-pincered misinformation that has propagated a national misunderstanding about opioids, and kept us from moving from blaming to healing. We know from a 2012 Bloomberg BusinessWeek exposé on Florida pill mill operators that it was actually oxycodone and hydrocodone-based generics that were fueling opioid use disorder. This total condemnation of Purdue, the Sackler family and Ox圜ontin resides entirely in the realm of fiction. Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton), a fictional general practitioner, is asked under oath, “What do you think caused so many deaths in such a short period of time?”įlashbacks intervene before Finnix states, definitively: “Ox圜ontin.” The prosecutor then hammers home the point by asking, “So just to be clear, you are blaming numerous deaths in your region on just one medication?” And with a heavy-heart, filled with prescriber regret and his own addiction stigmatization, Finnix states, “Yes.” While being questioned by a federal prosecutor, Dr. In the first episode, Strong creates a highly dramatic, but erroneous opening scene. It’s not difficult to find, if one searches beyond the bombast of mainstream news about opioids to focus instead on medical literature and government data. This data was available at the time of Macy’s book release in 2018 and when the Hulu series came out in 2021. We know that throughout the opioid epidemic, Ox圜ontin made up, at most, only 4% of the total market for prescription opioids.
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