SecondThe bustling documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney takes a close look at the business of this century in his latest work “The Crime of the Century”: legal, highly addictive narcotic The product trade, in the United States by a political, private, medical network operated and entrepreneurial profiteer, has killed 500,000 Americans in the past two decades.
Gibney is a star in the documentary world: in 2005, he exposed the suspicious conspiracy of the energy giant of the same name in “Enron: The Smartest Man in the Room”. After September 11, 2001, his film “Taxi to the Dark Side” about American torture policies in Afghanistan won the 2007 Oscar for Best Documentary.In “We Steal Secrets” in 2013, he took a peek behind the scenes WikiLeaks, And recorded Silicon Valley’s fanatical adoration of the so-called talented young entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in the “Inventor” of 2019, and her revolutionary blood test does not even exist.
Gibney gave an example of previously published news research, in which case he also relied on Washington post, Patrick Radden Keefe (Patrick Radden Keefe), who was published in New York in 2017 and now in his book “Empire of Pain”, and research by Pulitzer Prize winner Barry Meier, the latter Since 2003, he has followed up the new edition of his book “Pain Relief” by the same name 15 years later.
Enter a multi-billion dollar empire through the opioid trade
According to Gibney, he worked on documents for two years, some of which were lengthy, and described the brothers Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer Sackler in a not always constant rhythm. The children of Eastern European immigrants from humble backgrounds, how to become doctors, buy medical advertising services and use dubious marketing painkillers to create wealth. In addition to the advertising business in the “Medical Tribune”, Arthur Sackler also owned a medical journal. When he and his brother acquired a medical patent company called Purdue Frederick in 1952, A family business that develops and sells drugs has laid the foundation. An association with expert advice and far-reaching political influence. Sackler’s next generation, especially Raymond’s son Richard, are working on the drug OxyContin (originally oxycodone, an opioid drug developed by Martin Freund and Edmund Speyer in Frankfurt in 1916) and expanding With the help of the successful campaign of therapeutic range, a billions of empires of painkillers and opioids were created.
The addictive potential of OxyContin, which was launched in 1996, has steadily increased demand. The more you give patients, the more they need. Keefe wrote in The New Yorker that this powerful and addictive drug should actually be limited to the lowest dose and specific patient groups. But because this runs counter to the profitability of pharmaceutical companies, Purdue University has taken the opposite approach. Soon, there are doses of 10 to 160 mg on the market. Purdue University and FDA officials jointly developed an approval letter that said the drug “will only cause you to become dependent if it is used legally.” Dr. Lynn Webster said that people should not criminalize people who are suffering, and his statement is contrary to the story of the seriously addicted Carol Rosley. Webster has internalized the spell of the opium trade. Even after she withdrew, he continued to prescribe opioids for the patient until she died of an overdose.
