Famed documentary director Alex Gibney’s penchant for scrutiny serves him (and his audience) well. His recent successes include skewering the botched pandemic response (which continues to disastrously reverberate) as well as Elizabeth Holmes and the Church of Scientology. He’s now taking aim at Big Pharma for his newest project, a two-part HBO documentary called Crime of the Century. As the trailer’s YouTube page succinctly puts things, “Big Pharma sold America a lie and made a killing.”
The trailer makes no secret of the documentary’s perspective, which is that corporate greed was nurtured (and, in fact, encouraged) by elected officials, and all of this led Purdue Pharma to aggressively market OxyContin. The highly profitable pill pushed through the FDA approvals for wide use without sufficient studies and evidence, and Justice Department efforts to halt the harm were extinguished by quietly settled lawsuits as opioid distributors and Purdue Pharma continued to build up enormous fortunes due to the pill’s overproduction. Gibney’s project also argues that this OxyContin-paved crisis made it much easier for even more dangerous prescription drugs to achieve the same results. Via an HBO press release:
With the help of whistleblowers, insiders, newly-leaked documents, exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes access to investigations, and featuring expert input from medical professionals, journalists, former and current government agents, attorneys and pharmaceutical sales representatives, as well as sobering testimony from victims of opioid addiction, Gibney’s exposé posits that drug companies are in fact largely responsible for manufacturing the very crisis they profit from, to the tune of billions of dollars… and hundreds of thousands of lives.
The Crime Of The Century debuts May 10 on HBO.