Crime of the Century
Series Directed and written by Alex Gibney …
Series Produced by
Nancy Abraham … executive producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Thomas Augsberger … Consulting Producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Sarah Dowland … producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Aaron Fishman … executive producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Alex Gibney … producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Lisa Heller … executive producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Todd Hoffman … executive producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Tina Nguyen … producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Stacey Offman … executive producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Richard Perello … executive producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Svetlana Zill … producer (2 episodes, 2021)
Series Cast
Patrick Radden Keefe Lenny Bernstein Gary Blinn Roy Bosley Alec Burlakoff Kadrolsha Ona Carole Scott Higham Sari Horowitz Andrew Kolodny Sidney Caleb Lanier David Lazarus Anna Lembke Barry Meier Jonathan Novak Paul Pelletier Joe Rannazzisi Mark Ross Giles Sartin Art Van Zee Lynn Webster Fred M. Wyshak Jr. Nathaniel Yeager
If there is one sort-of bright spot in the wake of corporate America’s dabbling in mass murder, it is that the war on drugs that has twisted and hardened American society since the late Nixon years has all but collapsed. Battles against cannabis and psychoactives always were stupid, cruel, and usually racist. And while a case could be made against the sales of addictive drugs by vicious cartels, even that has paled in the wake of the 850,000 people in the US killed by opioids created and marketed by Big Pharma, beginning with oxycontin and Purdue Drugs.
Drug companies always envied the drug cartels and the vast amounts of money being raked in from heroin by the cartels. What they needed was a way to sell heroin in a way where it wasn’t obvious what it was and market it to a servile and dim-witted congress as something that could benefit people.
So they hit on renaming the residue of the poppy “codones” and putting it in timed release capsule, supposedly to make overdoses impossible.
It turned out to be incredibly profitable to nobody’s surprise, and companies like Purdue and the Sackler family (Sackler is non-Italian for “Our Thing”) even as horrifying reports emerged of a rapidly-rising OD rate. Oxycontin bottles were color-coded and had the dosage on the label as the predominant feature, making it clear to doctors they bribed that the higher the dosage they could peddle, the richer they would become.
Crime of the Century is an HBO documentary, four hours over two episodes, that details in close detail just how the aptly-named crime of the century took place.
It’s one thing to know of the drug epidemic and the role “legitimate” drug companies played in that crime; four hours of step by step demonstration of the cold, calculating and callous way they went about it will fill you with fury.
If government treated these drug peddlers they way they did “street peddlers” several members of the Sackler family would have been hanged by now and many hundreds of corporate toadies and bent doctors would be doing decades in prison. Hasn’t really happened, and isn’t likely to happen because of a corrupt and bought-out Congress and endless American servility to wealth and “capitalism”. (Honestly, drug dealing is the absolute epitome of capitalism.)
Crime of the Century isn’t fun watching. But chances are you know someone the drug companies murdered with this scheme, maybe someone close to you. You need to know this stuff, and hope that someday there will be a real accounting.