“I did OxyContin once, recreationally,” Pete Berg says. “Someone asked me if I wanted to try it. I’ll try pretty much anything once, and I remember the feeling I had was that I was being slowly dropped into a warm tub of honey.”
It’s always intriguing to see how a filmmaker depicts the experience of being on drugs, and I’d asked how Berg made his choices while directing Painkiller—a six-episode Netflix series, streaming today—which tracks the opioid that changed everything in this country.
“It felt incredible,” he continues, “and afterwards, I'm like, Yeah, I'm not going near that again. The drug works. I’ve never done heroin, but I've heard that it's comparable. OxyContin in our show is that warm honey bath.”
Berg asks if I’d ever tried it. I say opiates are one thing I’ve tried to avoid, even if I was once presented with a large bottle of pills on the occasion of having a couple wisdom teeth pulled. That’s a version of the story that afflicts Glen Kryger (played by Taylor Kitsch), a mechanic who runs his own business until he falls at work, damages his back, and starts taking Oxycontin for the pain. You probably have an idea of what comes next, considering how emblematic this path to addiction has become in the broader epidemic. Yet the rendering here from Kitsch still feels raw and visceral—a horror in slow motion.
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