Melissa Harris-Perry: This month marks the release of the new Hulu miniseries Dopesick. Based on a book by the same name, by journalist Beth Macy, Dopesick details how the Sackler family and their company, Purdue Pharma, made billions while initiating a massive drug epidemic. Refusing to sensationalize the crisis, the Dopesick miniseries connects this corporate greed with stories of those directly harmed by it.

Male Speaker 1: Our initial rollout will be focused on southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and rural Maine. Do you know why? Anyone?

Male Speaker 2: They're mining, farming, logging centers, places where folks get injured doing labor-intensive jobs.

Male Speaker 1: Correct. These people are in pain. They have hard lives and we have the cure, so we are sending you all into the wild to flip these country doctors from Percocet and Vicodin to Oxycontin.

Melissa Harris-Perry: With me now is Danny Strong, creator, showrunner, and director of Dopesick. Thanks for being here, Danny.

Danny Strong: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you talk to me about why the decision to tackle so many different pieces all at once?

Danny Strong: Well, because it's such a complicated, dynamic, and multifaceted issue that to tell just one story, to me, didn't feel like that's the truth or the essence of the opioid crisis. There are so many different elements. There's the lies of Purdue Pharma, its victims. There's also these investigations that occurred, US Attorney John Brownlee out of Western Virginia, the DEA, in 2000 to 2002, had active investigations into Purdue Pharma.

I thought by telling those stories as well, you could really shine a spotlight on the actual crimes that Purdue committed and then ultimately, where the US Attorney case and where the DEA investigations went, tie into one of the bigger issues that created the opioid crisis, which is the revolving door. Which is money to influence in our government institutions and how they can be influenced to such an extent that a company like Purdue Pharma was able to flourish, even after oxycontin, and become famous.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For all its complexity and the fact that it does not simply flatten people into good guys and bad guys, there are at least a couple of clear villains in this portrayal. Can you talk to me a little bit about your decisions about how to represent those at the very top of Purdue Pharma?

Danny Strong: The company is micromanaged by the Sackler family. Now, for years, they denied that and they said, "Oh, we're passive participants. We're just on the board. Other people were making decisions," and then all their emails started coming out in discovery and all the attorney general cases against them, and lo and behold, that was like everything else that ties into Purdue Pharma a lie.

I wanted to show who was making these decisions, and it's been very well documented at this point in numerous books by credibly gifted journalists including Beth Macy and Patrick Radden Keefe, Berry Meyer, Gerald Posner, the list goes on and on that Richard Sackler was the Godfather who was managing the production, and launch, and distribution of Oxycontin. He was the person overseeing this.

We had to portray him as a character in the show. Then it gets a little more complicated because he's perceived in such a negative light. How can I multi-dimensionalize him? Then I was able to interview some people that knew him, and they disliked him more than the activists. It was very difficult to find anyone to say anything nice about Richard Sackler and, clearly, this is a complicated individual.

An individual that puts people off even when he's in the company of them, but I still felt like, "Well, there's got to be something more to this than greed." Clearly, greed is a huge motivation, but what else is there? What else has motivated him? I went on a deep dive to try to crack this mystery of what's really happening with Richard Sackler and I feel like, "Yes, I can totally see how it's perceived as a villainous portrayal."

What that company did was absolutely awful that he was micromanaging. At the same time, I do think there are dimensions to it that are interesting, that are human, that go deeper than I think people would have expected, even people that I interviewed that knew him would have expected in what we were able to achieve in the show.

Melissa Harris-Perry: My favorite moment so far-- I'm only four episodes in, but my favorite moments so far is actually your portrayal of FBI Director James Comey, who seems to be a bit confused about the language of the Purdue family and thinks that his investigators are looking at chicken.

Danny Strong: [chuckles] Yes, so this actually happened early in the investigation. The US Attorney John Brownlee and his assistant US attorneys on the case, Randy Ramseyer and Rick Mountcastle, were told they had to come to Washington, DC to meet with the Deputy Attorney General to discuss the case. Obviously, they were immediately concerned.

The case, it was very early in the process and they thought, "Wow, is the Deputy Attorney General James Comey," which is what he was at the time, "is he going to shut us down before we even began?" They go to Washington, DC, and right out of the gate, Comey says, "Why are you investigating the chicken guy?" [chuckles] And there's obviously this confusion.

Then it became apparent that he thought that they were investigating Frank Perdue of Perdue Farms, not Purdue Pharma. Once they cleared that up, he said, "Well, go make your case." They were off to the races once again but yeah, very strange.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm just so happy that story is true. As I watched it, I thought, "Did they make this up?" I'm so pleased-- both pleased and horrified to know that that story is true.

Danny Strong: Yes, very, very, very strange. One of the strange events of the opioid crisis.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's maybe a light-hearted intervention, but the show is really, at times, quite tragic. More than anything, I might describe it as-- and we've talked about this on The Takeaway before, as being sincere, particularly the character of the lead doctor, who is a small-town doctor in a coal mining community. Just feels like a sincere, good guy who was trying to do his best and to serve a community that is typically underserved, and yet ended up having and doing great harm to that same community.

Danny Strong: Well, I was really fascinated, and just personally wanted to know, "How did this happen on the ground?" When you look at these events-- I started researching this in 2018, the idea that they could say an opioid was practically non-addictive, that less than 1% of people got addicted, that they were using these phrases like pseudoaddiction, which meant addiction didn't really exist, they seem absurd when you look back at it through a 2018 lens.

I wanted to know, "So how did that happen? How did these doctors, how did these people that went to medical school essentially fall for this con, for this lie?" I interviewed multiple doctors, and it was really fascinating talking to them. There's basically three different doctors that Dr. Finnix is directly inspired by. One of them Dr. Steven Lloyd, he just gave an interview in which he referred to the show as "balls on accurate."

I thought, "Well, that's pretty good." I think we did pretty good there, but so yes, they're obviously were doctors that took advantage of the fact that it was so addictive, and they open pill mills, and they were just trying to obviously make as much money and as dark and as corrupt a way as they could but that's not the story of all the doctors that prescribed this medication. I think that's a much smaller percentage of the doctors.

I think most of the doctors thought, "Oh, this is a great new drug that is way less addictive than other opioids," or so they thought, "so I'm going to prescribe it to my patients in pain." I wanted to know, how did that happen? We see it through the character of Dr. Finnix and his journey.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Danny, here's my one irritation as I watched, and here's all this humanity and particularly the humanity of those who became addicted, who were literally just looking for pain relief went to doctors, they trusted. Doctors who they trusted then prescribe something because they had been largely lied to. I got to say, I walked away feeling like I still haven't seen this level of complexity and humanity in the portrayal of black urban drug users.

It's less a critique of Dopesick itself and more of wondering why we have now this beautiful story but where does truly focused on [inaudible 00:10:02] predominantly white working-class communities. I think so many of the negative portrayals and assumptions that we have about people of color who use drugs remain.

Danny Strong: Yes. Look, I don't disagree with you at all. In the case of Dopesick and the opioid crisis, that was very much targeted in these white rural communities, particularly in these early stages. Then there's also a theory that institutional racism was actually helpful in that doctors weren't prescribing oxycontin to their Black patients out of this racist biased that they couldn't take it, or that they would abuse it.

It's sort of a Patrick Radden Keefe in the book Empire of Pain calls it a rare example in which institutional racism was actually helpful. Now, in what you're talking about, like I said, I completely agree with you. So much of what we were trying to do with this show was also redefine the stereotype of addiction, the understanding of addiction, particularly in opioid addiction in which your brain chemistry has been changed.

I would encourage filmmakers of all colors to do exactly what you just said, which is tell this story in the Black community as well because I think for a long time, addiction has been portrayed, is exactly as how you said it. I think addiction has been portrayed in that way across the board, and that was certainly a motivation for how we did it in this show. It was very important to Beth Macy, in particular, who wrote the book Dopesick because that's so much of what the core of her book is about.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can I ask and feel free to punt this question if you want to. Again, the humanity, the complexity, I'm wondering if you have personal stories here? If you are connected to this crisis, in a way that gave you entry? If this is a story that any of us whether we are directly connected to this crisis or not, can, in fact, find entry points of empathy?

Danny Strong: Yes. No, I'm very fortunate and that I don't have a personal connection to it. I, myself, have never had an opioid use disorder. There's no one that I know of that was close to me that did or they got caught up in this rabbit hole of oxycontin addiction. My interest in it came purely from my outrage upon reading about it. That I could not believe that a pharma company run by a single family, that this company could be so deceptive, deceitful, dishonest.

That they could just lie through their teeth to sell an addictive drug as non-addictive. Here's what really set my hair on fire when I was deep in my initial researching of it was that our show dramatizes the 2007 case against Purdue Pharma that the US Attorney brought. Well, at the end of that, there is a settlement, there's a guilty plea by Purdue Pharma. This is all historical record.

What does Purdue Pharma do after this guilty plea? Do they reformulate the drug right away? Are they contrite? Do they change their marketing? No, they sell even harder, they become even more aggressive. They act as if this was just a speed bump. This was just a fine, this was just the price of doing business, and we are going to try and make even more money and then they tripled their sales within two years.

To me, that is, I think, if there's no proof of pathology of this being just one of the great crimes committed on this country, I don't know what is. It really came from outrage and then a hope that may be a dramatization of what happens. In the last two episodes, we dive into therapies of how to treat opioid use disorder that are highly stigmatized but are actually really helpful. It's very difficult for lots of people to get access to these drugs, buprenorphine, suboxone.

To shine a light on these drugs as a helpful path forward, I thought, "Well, this show could also maybe do some good too." If it could get more people into treatment, and even if it's not suboxone. If it's just some treatment that perhaps they weren't taking before because they have a better understanding of what they're afflicted with or what their loved ones are afflicted with, I thought, "Oh, well, maybe this can actually do some good too besides me just being really, really angry."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Speaking of projects that you have created around, we were talking earlier before we got started about Recount, your piece about the 2000 election recount where you actually spoke with a class of mine at Princeton many, many, many years ago, Sarah Palin's vice-presidential run, now this piece. What is next for you as a big story that you're hoping to tackle?

Danny Strong: I'm not so sure yet. I've got a few different things I'm toying with, and I usually don't like to talk about stuff until it feels actually real. Right now, they're all just thoughts and sketches.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Well, we will be watching and waiting. In the meantime, we'll be watching Dopesick. Danny Strong is the creator, director, and showrunner of the limited series, Dopesick, which is out now on Hulu. I know because I stayed up late to watch it. Thanks so much, Danny.

Danny Strong: Thanks so much for having me. It was so great talking to you again.

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