I Like to Watch | Dopesick (Hulu)
Police investigating body found in west Wichita
Wichita Police are investigating after a body was discovered in the 200 block of S West St.
Police said a body was found in a vehicle in a restaurant parking lot just before 6 p.m. Tuesday. Wichita Police Officer Wheeler said, at this point, no foul play is believed to be involved, and investigators are trying to find out what caused the death.
The person who died is believed to be a man, but Ofc. Wheeler said the body was "too far decomposed" to tell any other details before an autopsy.
If you’re the sort who combs the news for these sorts of blurbs, this was right there to see. No foul play so it doesn’t get any viral videos online. The description that the body was in the full force of decomposition to the point that the sex was almost indecipherable is grisly but couched in language that tamps down the horror.
This person, found in his car dead for days, was my nineteen-year-old nephew.
His mother, my only sister, knew he was missing six days prior. We all knew. A missing persons report was filed. His older brother, older sister, and I jumped onto his social media accounts and tried to see if any one of his friends had a bead on him. No one did.
We constructed hopeful fictions. He was high (he smoked a lot of weed and dabbled in other drugs) and was sleeping it off. He decided that his life in Pandemic Wichita was too much, hopped in his car and was en route to Vegas to hang with his uncle. He lost his phone and his car was stolen. He’d been arrested and was too embarrassed to call anyone.
The thing about hopeful fictions is that they mostly turn out to be just that—fiction.
The truth was harsh. My nephew had called off work and hung out with friends. On the way from one place to another the fentanyl he’d taken made him sleepy enough that he pulled into a parking lot of a restaurant closed by COVID, fell asleep, and never woke up.
Fentanyl is the third wave of an opioid epidemic that began in the 1990s with prescription pills, followed by exploding heroin use.
Now communities are struggling under an onslaught of fentanyl. The reasons are multilayered: As pharmaceutical companies have tightened the tap on prescription pain pills following a raft of legal losses for their role in causing the opioid epidemic, the pills have become scarce on the black market. Addicts have turned to fentanyl for their fix.
To profit off the situation, cartels and small-time manufacturers have flooded in caches of imitation pills — fentanyl tablets mimicking prescription brands. In September, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration issued a public safety alert: More than 40 percent of black-market prescription pills contain lethal amounts of fentanyl.
As a child of the eighties. I can attest to trying lots of illegal drugs in my day. I smoked my first joint when I was ten years old, dropped my first acid tab when I was eleven, and shot heroin shortly thereafter. When I visited my natural father for a summer in Irving, TX, he gifted me with a quaalude. Coke came during college.
After some time living, I came to the conclusion that while experimentation was fine, I was an addict waiting to happen. I also realized over time that no matter how much fun it was to take drugs, the result was almost never positive. Either I felt like complete shit the next day or I woke up having done something stupid and destructive. To this day, I still wake up after drinking too much wondering if I've done something horrible I'll have to make amends for.
Like adventurous sex practices in my youth (and, unfortunately, in my mid-forties as well) the further into the rabbit hole of debauchery I've gone, the worse the result. My wife thinks I'm terribly vanilla but that is a choice from bad experiences rather than an uptight and clenched bunghole.
I understand that desire to push the envelope so my reaction to my nephew, saddled with his own unique problems in the world and bizarre temptations growing up surrounded by social media, was to caution him when it seemed appropriate, never shame him for delving into that darkness, and hope, like me, he made it out with some self reflection.
As a child of the eighties, I was never exposed to opioids as a legal pain pill so effectively addictive that it actually changes your brain chemistry during use so violently it is nearly impossible to kick.
"Fentanyl was originally formulated as a medical drug, something that was used in ... open heart surgery and in end-of-life care," Westhoff says. "It's an opioid that is 50 times stronger than heroin, 100 times stronger than morphine."
Westhoff's book Fentanyl, Inc. examines the manufacture, sale and use of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. Over the course of his research, he visited two factories in China that make synthetic opioids and ship them to the U.S. or to Mexican drug cartels for distribution.
Westhoff notes that the synthetic opioids, which are sold over the "dark Web," are often cut into other drugs, including heroin, cocaine and even prescription pills.
"Basically, it's so cheap to produce and it's so powerful, that drug dealers began realizing it was a way to increase their profits," Westoff says.
I'll admit to doing the thing that I do when confronted with horrors. I expressed my grief, compartmentalized it, stuffed into a box in my soul, and left it there. That's how I was raised, that's always worked. I held it together when helping my sister cremate him and deal with car (then a biohazard to be removed rather than a vehicle to be sold) but completely broke down while making a memorial video for her.
Since then, I find myself in odd moments and for various reasons thinking of him and losing my composure. I'm a weepy fucker anyway, so it's rarely cause for alarm. These moments remind me that while my life goes on, his did not and I miss him.
And, once in a while in those moments, those tears are molten hot with a sense of uncontainable rage.
On June 17, 2020, it was announced that Hulu had greenlit a limited series order consisting of eight episodes based on the book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted Americaby Beth Macy. The series was created by Danny Strong who also served as executive producer alongside Michael Keaton, Warren Littlefield, John Goldwyn, Beth Macy, Karen Rosenfelt, and Barry Levinson who directed.
I wasn't drawn to Dopesick because of my nephew. I just love Michael Keaton who, in addition to producing, plays a central figure in the narrative.
Starting in the mid-1990s, Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler Family, set about making Oxycontin the most popular pain relief pill in the United States, complete with an FDA-approved label claiming that it was less addictive than other drugs in the same class.
Beginning with industrial mining and logging towns, the drug spread out across the country. A few years later it was obvious Oxycontin was causing rising crime and an army of addicts. The DEA got involved. The US State's Attorney of Virginia pursued the Sacklers. Families were destroyed, communities under siege collapsed, and Purdue made billions.
This is a big storyline and Strong swings big to match it. Spanning from the beginnings of the Purdue Pharma creation of the drug to the first class action lawsuit decades later, the eight-part series follows multiple storylines in non-chronological order, bouncing around the timeline.
We see a young woman in a Virginia mining town, Betsy Mallum (Kaitlyn Dever) and her family doctor, Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton). She injures herself on the job, he has been sold Oxycontin by a Purdue sales rep, Billy Cutler (Will Poulter), so the doctor prescribes the new drug. He then gets into a car accident and has Oxycontin prescribed for himself. The two become hopelessly addicted with consequences to boot.
We also follow Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard) and his prosecutorial partner Randy Ramseyer (John Hoogenakker) along with DEA Agent Bridget Meyer (Rosario Dawson) as they go about the slow process of building a case against the Sacklers.
Finally, we get to see Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) playing Kendal Roy via a wheezy Hannibal Lecter manipulate his family and pushing Oxycontin in larger doses to be sold in greater quantities to effectively drug the entire planet.
I never placed the untimely demise of my nephew in a bigger picture. He was my nephew, my sister's son, my mother's grandson. This was our tragedy, not a part of anything larger than that. Watching Dopesick managed to shift that perspective. Opioids are not created for recreation like quaaludes, weed, or coke. Opioids are created for destruction in exchange for massive profits.
The kids who leap into this are looking for a quick high not a quick death. When my nephew took his fatal hit of fentanyl he was just looking for something to help him numb his angst, to shut out the world for a moment. He feel asleep and never woke up thanks to this fucking nightmare drug.
Sure, we binge so many shows these days but I can guarantee you that three seasons of Succession or Taboo are not going to both provide a comprehensive true life story that educates and infuriates like this one. Wanna get pissed about something more important than pronouns, Dave Chappelle, or Kyle Rittenhouse? Watch Dopesick.
