How did we get to the point where the people we trusted we can no longer trust? Trigger-happy police, clergy who pray to God and then abuse children, and now it’s the family doctor handing out opioids like they were jellybeans.
Monday night, May 1, while Rihanna was stunning the fashion elite at the illustrious Met Ball, in a dress that looked like a cross between the entire rose garden from Alice in Wonderland and a mop shop, that only Rihanna could in some weird way make work, director Perri Peltz was stunning viewers in an altogether different way. Her HBO documentary, “Warning: This Drug May Kill You”, stuns, shocks, scares and saddens beyond words by showing us the truth about the opioid epidemic that’s going on in our country. By bringing us in, up close and very personal, with four families whose lives have been shattered by opioid abuse, Ms. Peltz lets us see that this epidemic isn’t about “all of those back alley people” as one family member in the film states, but about all of us.
Peltz goes for the gut immediately, no making nice and letting us glide into the movie. No, from the very first shots one is gasping. Shots of a young woman lying on a bus stop bench, voices off camera saying she’s OD’d. The camera pans in close to her face and lets us see how pretty she is and how half dead she looks. A teenage boy, some mother’s son, head back, eyes rolled up, mouth slacked, unsuccessfully trying to be revived. Again the voices in the background saying he’s OD’d. And then the real killer, a mother passed out on the floor of a supermarket aisle while her crying toddler tugs frantically at her arm crying “mommy, mommy” over and over.
It’s a perfect segue into a clip of Dr. Alan Spano speaking in a marketing video for Purdue Pharmacy endorsing the use of opioids. He is saying the medical profession got it wrong, that opioids are not addictive. (Tell it to the toddler in the supermarket, Dr. Spano). In the video, suited up, looking professional and trustworthy, he goes on to say that opioids should be much more liberally dispensed. Even though Purdue Pharmacy settled a huge lawsuit in 2007 for fraud due to it’s opioid claims, there are still 250 million prescriptions written a year for drugs in the opioid family that includes Vicadin, Oxycodone and Narco, which are considered the “top-shelf” brands.
80 % of heroin users start out taking opioids after well meaning doctors prescribed them following an accident or surgery. Unfortunately those same doctors never told them to stop taking them as soon as possible because the drugs were highly addictive. No one explained the weaning off process and how painful it is, in fact so painful that most people go right back on the pills to cope with the withdrawal.
The film brings us into the homes of four families, three of which have had a family member overdose on heroin. Opioid addiction often leads to a heroin habit since heroin is both cheaper and easier to get on the open market than opioids, once the prescription runs out.
We first meet Stephany and Kelly, her mother, in their middle class house in Beach Park, Ill. Stephany, full face to camera explains how she was always the good girl growing up. Camera pans away from her face to 10 year old Stephany cute as the proverbial button. Camera then goes to her as teenager, still looking fresh and pretty. She explains that at 16 she was diagnosed with kidney stones and was sent home from the doctor with a 60 day supply of Vicadin and a 60 day supply of Oxycodone. Pretty soon she found out how much better she felt on the pills and was going through a months supply in two days. She was also sharing her pills with her younger sister, Ashley, who wanted to do everything big sister Stephany did. Soon both girls had replaced the pills with snorting heroin because it was cheaper and the high lasted longer.
Within a year they were both doing the thing they had sworn they would never do, shooting up. They were full blown junkies living for their next fix. In explaining the feeling she got from heroin, Stephany says, “I loved it and it loved me back”, saying that even after losing her house, her husband, and custody of her daughter. Both she and sister Ashley go to rehab and get clean but not long after Ashley OD’d in a motel room going for one last great high.
Peltz and crew go back to interview Stephany after Ashleys death and she is sober telling her mother that she “couldn’t imagine going back to that life, to the needle” and that she could never put her mother through the death of another child. She is believable because she believes it herself. After that segment one sentence comes on the black screen. “Stephany relapsed six weeks later”.
The next story convinces viewers that this opioid epidemic is truly hitting you, me and the lovely neighbors next door. Peltz opens on a pretty fresh faced teenage girl with long blond hair. All that’s missing is her cheerleading outfit. The girl is showing a picture of herself taken with her mother when she was six. Her blue eyes dominate the photo as she hugs in close to her very pretty and stylish mother. We then meet her two handsome, well groomed and well spoken bothers, 17 and 18. They are products of a well to do family from Mill Valley, an upscale suburb of San Francisco.
The boys read cards they’ve kept from their mother. One reads a text that makes no sense at all and explains she sent it when she was high. She had been addicted to opioids since the caesarean birth of her last child. After eleven stints at rehab she finally OD’d. This is a family who had it all. A woman who had it all. Her husband broke his heart and his bank account trying to save her but the headwinds he was up against were too strong.
The week before she died she went to the hospital for kidney stones. When she checked herself out of the hospital four days later she left with eight bottles of opioids. The next morning she was gone. In the final shot, her daughter voices her anger at the doctors in the hospital, “the hospital she had been to over 50 times and had her stomach pumped” for sending her home with eight bottles of opioids.
There are two other families featured with heartbreaking stories as well. There’s an upscale family from a wealthy suburb in New Jersey whose all American son started with opioids after a cyst removal and ended up a heroin addict, OD-ing in his childhood bedroom after a stint in rehab. The other was a middle class family whose only daughter, Georgia, also OD’d on heroin after being put on opioids due to a hip injury from falling off of a porch. The final scene in which, Georgia’s father speaks about finding her dead on Thanksgiving morning, is made eerily more poignant as the camera pans across pictures of her from toddler to teen behind him. Falling off of a porch, leading to heroin? Makes no sense, but its happening all around us.
This isn’t Ms. Peltz’s first rodeo. She is extremely talented in connecting with her subjects and getting them to open up and allow the audience in. Combining her background as a broadcast journalist and her passion for social issues related to both health, inequality and justice, she’s zeroed in on material dealing with various issues including the impact on the lives of those who have health insurance vs those who don’t, (“The Education of Dee Dee Ricks”), the rehabilitation of both prison inmates and military vets (“Prison Dogs”) and the destructiveness of alcohol addiction (“Risky Drinking”).
The trajectory of her work has clearly led her to her current project, “Warning: This Drug May Kill You”. In the end we’re left with a warning of sorts that comes in the words of Kelly, Stephany’s mother who repeatedly and apologetically says throughout the film, “I trusted the doctors”. Don’t we all.