I think I wouldn't really regard this documentary as anything compelling if not for the second part, where the curtain lifts and you're being shown how all the drugs get peddled on the industrial level, along with the wonderful inner workings of the American system allowing them to do it. Making the poor DEA a butt of the joke yet again, as if they don't have enough problems catching smugglers across the border for almost fifty years, they can't even hold it off on their own territory anymore.
The insistence that Americans are apparently so receptive to pharma marketing that they got gaslighted within a decade into thinking that they need to gulp ten painkillers a day because they got neck plate surgery is well illustrated, even if I still think personal responsibility should be emphasized much more than this documentary allows itself to profess. Something more than just shaking fists at Sacklers, unless you just want to get high without consequences. It also doesn't really demonstrate how a drug brought into public consciousness in the 1990s resulted in an epidemic in mid-2010, skyrocketing overdoses into the absolute stratosphere and putting every other drug to shame. Recreational abuse is a more likely pretext, compounded by fentanyl. And really, fentanyl just made it all irrelevant in the long run. Harp on the big pharma all you want; you can't compete with cartels working with Chinese.
The insistence that Americans are apparently so receptive to pharma marketing that they got gaslighted within a decade into thinking that they need to gulp ten painkillers a day because they got neck plate surgery is well illustrated, even if I still think personal responsibility should be emphasized much more than this documentary allows itself to profess. Something more than just shaking fists at Sacklers, unless you just want to get high without consequences. It also doesn't really demonstrate how a drug brought into public consciousness in the 1990s resulted in an epidemic in mid-2010, skyrocketing overdoses into the absolute stratosphere and putting every other drug to shame. Recreational abuse is a more likely pretext, compounded by fentanyl. And really, fentanyl just made it all irrelevant in the long run. Harp on the big pharma all you want; you can't compete with cartels working with Chinese.