Frontline’s Opioids, Inc. (full film):
Pushing opioids. Bribing doctors. Making millions. FRONTLINE and the Financial Times investigate how Insys Therapeutics profited from a fentanyl-based painkiller up to 100 times stronger than heroin — and how some Wall Street investors looked the other way.
Since 2007, communities like Whitewater have faced a Great Recession, an opioid epidemic, economic stagnation, a pandemic, and now another recession. Whitewater’s like places that had to endure both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl at the same time.
It’s notable that, as with the novel coronavirus, America has mostly viewed the opioid crisis as a public health matter. However poorly addressed (or simply ignored), opioid addiction and the coronavirus are rightly public health matters.
Another public health crisis – a surge in the use of crack cocaine in the ‘80s and early ‘90s – wrongly received a punitive, rather than therapeutic, response.
In this moment of increased cultural awareness, the Draconian approach to one group of drug users remains another example of wrongly-biased enforcement.