- According to the CDC, more than 588,000 Americans have died from opioid overdose since 1999.

Today's guest tells the story of that epidemic in Dopesick, a new, limited series on Hulu.

He's Danny Strong.

This week on Story in the Public Square.

(vibrant instrumental music) Hello, and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

- This week, we're joined by Danny Strong, an actor, writer, director, and producer of some of the most powerful productions you'll ever see on screen, including Dopesick, a new, limited series on Hulu.

Danny, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks so much for having me.

I'm thrilled to be here.

- You know, we are so grateful to have you here, and we're grateful too because it was your acceptance speech of the Pell Center prize years ago that launched the show.

So thank you on multiple fronts.

Danny, we are dazzled by Dopesick.

Can you just give us a quick overview of what the production is?

- Yeah, no, thank you so much.

And I'm thrilled that you're enjoying the show.

Although in some ways it's hard to say to enjoy that show.

It's a unique experience, but it is the story of the opioid crisis, specifically around the crimes of Purdue Pharma, in which we follow multiple people who were caught in the vortex of the opiod crisis.

Prosecutors bringing a case against Purdue Pharma, a DEA agent who was trying to stop Purdue Pharma.

And then we're also in a small mining town in Appalachia where we see a country doctor, played by Michael Keaton, who is prescribing Oxycontin to his patients because he's been convinced by reps from Purdue Pharma that the drug is safe, that it's this new miracle drug that is much safer than any other opioid ever put on the market.

And, as part of the sales pitch, Oxycontin has a unique label from the FDA that says that the drug is less addictive than other opioids.

And then the last storyline we follow is we're actually in Purdue Pharma with the Sackler family, the family that owned and controlled this company, as we see the different deceptive marketing techniques that the company would devise to mislead doctors and patients that their drug was safe when in fact it was not.

- So it was my wife and I have watched this.

What we've tried to grapple with is how much of this is facts as they happen and how much of it is fiction?

- Yeah, the show is very accurate.

It's very accurate, even when it's being fictionalized, because what you're seeing is you're seeing things that did happen.

In some cases, you're seeing things happen exactly as they occurred.

Some of it's verbatim and some of it is dramatizations based upon experiences of multiple people.

So the show is quite accurate.

There's parts of the show that are fictionalized.

That fictionalization is to give a somewhat of a universal truth of things that happen to many people.

And by many, I mean, hundreds of thousands, I'm trying to encapsulate the experience of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, into a couple of composite characters that are very much archetypes of journeys that different people went through.

And then as far as what you're seeing in Purdue Pharma is you're basically seeing Purdue Pharma 101, you're seeing the marketing techniques that they came up with.

And it's very much, you know, Purdue, like I said, Purdue Pharma 101.

These are, yes, they're not verbatim meetings, yet the stuff that they're coming up with and devising is exactly what the company came up with and devised.

So what's being portrayed is what was actually done, whether it's been portrayed verbatim or not.

In some cases, it is verbatim, that I would take email exchanges between Richard Sackler and another employee, and I would take that email exchange and turn it into a scene that is almost verbatim what is said in these email exchanges.

So I don't know if you could get more factual than taking someone's own email exchange and turning it into dialogue in which I would alter, I don't know, a sentence or two, and that altering was literally just to make it sound conversational as opposed to written.

So the show is quite accurate.

- So I want to get into some of the reaction you've had to this, start with the general reaction.

And by that, I mean, the viewing public, I know it's been a tremendous hit for Hulu, but what are you hearing just from ordinary folks like me and like Jim, for example, and our wives, who've been watching this and have been blown away.

What are you hearing?

- That, to be honest with you, is that people are blown away.

They're shocked, they're stunned, they're enraged by what this company did.

They're at times devastated by what the actions of this company, what it did to people, everyday people, and how it turned their lives upside down in such a tragic, unfair way.

And I just think people were pretty, they're pretty stunned at what they're seeing, that this all happened.

And it's pretty clear when you're watching it too that we're not exaggerating.

These events, this is what went down.

And in the case of Purdue Pharma, all the deception that we show is things that they have already pled guilty to, that they have signed in a statement of facts that came from a settlement in 2007.

Actually I believe that the settlement was 2006, but the final sentencing hearing, plea hearing was in 2007.

So we're taking the crimes of Purdu e and we're showing exactly what those crimes are.

And we've been on the air now for five, six weeks.

I haven't seen one denial from Purdue or from the Sackler family stating that anything that we've portrayed is untrue.

At least not yet.

- What about from within the behavioral health treatment and addiction treatment communities and from people who are addicted, or family members of people who are or were addicted, what are you hearing from them?

I'm guessing, again, you're hearing a lot.

- Very grateful.

Very grateful the story's being told, very grateful there is a deeper understanding of addiction.

So many people that have addiction issues are, they're highly stigmatized, they're viewed in a negative light, they're viewed as if they are, you know, the losers and the failures of society, as opposed to someone that actually has a disease.

In the case of an opioid addiction, their brain chemistry has been changed.

And until their frontal lobe can be rewired, can be healed, it's very likely that they have this overwhelming need for some type of opioid, whether it be Oxycontin, or many people move on to heroin, because it's much cheaper, because if they don't get that, and they're suffering from an opioid use disorder, they feel as if the withdrawal pain is so severe, they feel as if they're gonna die.

And that's what being dopesick is.

It's that feeling of withdrawal, that you are in massive pain that will not be alleviated unless you are given your next fix to ease or end those withdrawal symptoms.

So the fact that we're shining such a big light on this has been, I've just, you know, on social media in particular, is where I'm getting most of the feedback, but then also a lot of people are emailing Beth Macy, emailing various people, and then those emails get forwarded to me.

And it's just an overwhelming sense of gratitude the story's being told, thrilled the stories being told, thankful the story is being told.

So we're really pleased to have been able to have gotten this out there to this extent.

- Danny, you mentioned Beth Macy.

And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about your collaboration with her.

- Mm-hmm.

Here's my mug, my mug.

(Jim laughs) I love Beth Macy.

She's an incredible person.

She wrote a wonderful book.

I'd actually come up with this show and sold it to this studio called 20th, which is in the Disney company, before I even knew Beth's book existed.

And then another division at Disney, a different studio, went and bought the book Dopesick in a bidding war.

And I read about that on Deadline Hollywood, this entertainment news site, that my own studio had a competing project against me.

It was a very unusual situation.

So they asked if I would team up with Beth Macy and the producer Warren Littlefield and with the book Dopesick.

So I read the book.

I thought it was a beautiful book, and more importantly, I met with Beth and I adored Beth.

So I agreed to team up.

So the show isn't a sort of beat for beat adaptation of the book Dopesick, because you won't find Dr. Finnix or Betsy, they're not even characters in Dopesick, right?

So it was, the show you're seeing is the show that I constructed, and then with the inclusion of the book, I found that the book helped deepen the show.

There were so many incredible stories and tales of people that had gone on this very heroin path of addiction and people that were fighting against Purdue.

And so I was able to get more stories into the show and Beth was in the writers' room full time.

She was a wonderful partner on the show.

We, her and I kept, we kept doing the interviews all the way through the process.

So new information kept coming and we were this sort of a Woodward and Bernstein.

Although I like to say that, you know, she was Woodward and I was Bernstein's incompetent cousin Sid.

(Jim and Wayne laugh) I'm sort of, I play a journalist on TV.

So, but we did really well.

We got, again, new information all the way till the end of the shoot that we would incorporate.

- So one of the hallmarks of your work has been the incredible amount of research that you've put into it.

And you described a little bit of it earlier, maybe talk a little bit more about the research that went into Dopesick, but the importance in general of doing the kind of intensive background research that you do and bring to your projects.

I'm thinking of, you know, Lee Daniels' The Butler, another example, Recount, you know, again, two major issues of our time.

Talk about research.

- Yeah, I mean, for me, research is, if you're gonna do, if you're gonna work on a non-fiction piece, well, if you don't want to do the research and find out the truth, why work on a non-fiction piece?

Just write a fictional piece.

So for me, the research is a huge part of what the story is.

In many ways, it's the fun of it as far as, well, if I feel as if there is enough here, a profound enough story, and this true story, that it can be turned into a piece of drama, a piece of art, a two-hour movie, an eight-hour limited series, wow, that must be really interesting what happened.

And so I'm just looking forward to the research and finding out what happened.

- So you do all the research, and we've talked about this before on this show, and you just gave a great outline of what you do, but then you have to create characters.

You have to take facts and the research and create, for example, Dr. Finnix, or Betsy Mallum.

How do you do that?

How do you make them so compelling and so human, and humanizing, I think, is another virtue of your work?

How do you take hard facts and make these incredible characters that work so well on the screen?

And then I want to ask how you got Michael Keaton, but start with the first part.

- Sure.

(Jim and Wayne laugh) Different for every project and every character.

So, and in this piece, because this piece has lots of true life characters and then a few composite characters, it's very different for even just within this piece, the process.

So with a composite character, there's actually a lot more freedom as far as creating the character, because it's not a real-life person in which I have a responsibility to them to portray them in a way that's as fair as possible.

And then also sometimes with a real-life person, it's hard to portray them to just find something that makes them interesting or worthy of being a character in a dramatization, right?

So there's all sorts of challenges with true life characters, which I'm happy to get to in a second.

On a composite character, like a Finnix or a Betsy, that is, it's less challenging, for me at least, because sort of the sky's the limit.

I can use anecdotes from so many different people.

I don't have to only use anecdotes for what Rick Mountcastle did, or what Randy Ramseyer did, or what Richard Sackler did.

With Dr. Finnix, he was based upon three different doctors.

They went on a similar journey that he went on.

And then the more I read of different books and articles, there were so many different doctors that went through what he went through.

It was way more than just three, which I, it's probably hundreds, right?

And Betsy is the same thing in which I just kept reading about these stories of addiction and these journeys that people would go on, and there would be a lot of similarities of the path of getting injured, taking the medication for the injury, it works great, then it then starts to not work so well, and then you have to up the dose.

And then all of a sudden, within a week, two weeks, a month, you find yourself addicted to it.

Then you're having this withdrawal pain.

And then eventually that addiction can often lead to someone having to switch to heroin because doctors are cutting them off, or they're having a harder time getting the medication, or heroin is just cheaper and easier to get sometimes.

So there was this journey that I just read about over and over, so those two characters were a compilation of all these true facts.

And then I'm able to use just my own creativity of creating a character and finding nuance and depth and storylines that I think will help enhance, in this case, the overall true story of what I'm trying to portray.

So, you know, and the fact that you find them some compelling, I just will say, thank you.

You know, I'm glad you feel that way.

It was a lot of work and it doesn't come easy, but that is why they hire me, you know, I'm a professional writer so that's my job.

Now, on the true characters, sometimes it's hard to crack that nut of what's going on with this person.

Some cases they are nuts.

So that's usually a little bit less hard, 'cause there's something really interesting there to pull from.

Some people aren't eccentric, some people are kind of boring.

Well then, you kind of lean into that, and that's the characterization at the end of the day.

But I try to find, I try to take the true life qualities that I get from them, either from what I've read about them, if I've interviewed them, you know, a lot in the interview, you just, a lot of things kind of come out of spending time with someone or watching them be interviewed, or in the case of Richard Sackler, it was interviews with people that knew him.

Because I didn't have access to him.

Now, he's given an eight-hour deposition that I was able to watch, and I got some characteristics from it, but he's very guarded and he's very careful.

And I can't make this assumption that that guarded, careful person in the middle of a taped deposition, that that is who that person is all the time, right?

So I was fortunate that I got to speak to a number of people at Purdue Pharma that worked there that knew him.

Then I went to sort of an extreme measure with Richard Sackler because there was something missing for me, he's viewed as just this monster, this American monster, a greedy monster who just wanted to make as much money as possible and that's why he oversaw all of this deception in the marketing of Oxycontin, and then never relented from that deception, just kept pushing as hard as he can, no matter, pushing his people to sell as hard as they can, no matter what information came out.

And I just felt there had to be more than that.

So, because he was already rich before Oxycontin existed, so was it really money?

And so I actually did a therapy session in which I role played that I was Richard Sackler, and it was a 45-minute therapy session.

And the therapist is married to a very famous screenwriter and does this kind of work with her husband.

And I'm friends with the husband so he said, "Oh yeah, that you're having a hard time getting under this character's skin, you got to do a session with my wife.

That's what I do."

So I was very fortunate to, A, have this friend, and then, B, the session itself was great.

It was really, by the way, I worked out my own issues as well.

(Jim and Wayne laugh) About Richard, and about myself too, but it was just, it was a very interesting technique to see if I could find more depth in an individual that was hard to unravel.

- I've never heard of that.

That's amazing.

I'm gonna have to take advantage of that.

What a great idea.

- [Danny] It was great, yeah.

- Danny, you, Wayne mentioned Michael Keaton, but this has got a terrific cast across the board.

Coming to work with these folks, tell me about the collaboration with the actors on screen?

- Yeah.

The actors are incredible.

They're the best of the best, you know, I myself am an actor, and I, yeah, I have 30 years of acting credits.

And so for me, I have not just the utmost respect for what actors do, but actually do it myself.

So I'm one of them.

And I view myself as one of them, and they view me the same way.

So I always have the best relationships with my actors on set, and it's not just the movie stars, or the very fancy award-winning actors.

For me, if you've got one line on my set, if you're a background person on my set and you're on camera, I'm, it's we're all in this together.

And I'm just trying to make the scenes work as well as I can, I want the actors to have a positive experience.

I want them to be loose and relaxed 'cause I just think work is better when everyone just feels relaxed and free.

So it's almost always a very positive experience for me working with the actors, because like I said, I'm very much one of them, and I approach it in that way.

And I think we all have, try to have a good time doing it, even when it's subject matter, so heroin or scenes that are so dark at times, that's my process as a producer and as a director.

- So you have a great number of issues that you could write about, and any number of ideas.

And I've actually said this on the show before, Stephen King was once asked, where did he get his ideas?

And he sorta smugly said, "Utica."

As in Utica, New York, which I thought was quite funny.

(Jim laughs) But how do you decide what to do?

I mean, again, there are so many issues you could tackle.

How do you decide what you want to do?

And then maybe you can talk about where you're going next or what you're doing next.

- Well, there's one place I go to, where I do get all my ideas.

Utica.

Same thing.

(Jim and Wayne laugh) I'm like, "Stephen!"

You know?

He's like, "Why do you wave at me?

I don't know who you are.

Stop waving at me."

I, you know, I never know.

The bar for me is very, very high for a story that I want to turn into a movie or a limited series or a TV show, because the amount of work that it takes is staggering.

And it goes on for years, and it's never ending, the amount of work.

And I enjoy the work, but it's not even the creative part, it's the process of getting it made, production meetings, you know, trying to get a bigger budget, trying to get a marketing budget, trying to even get anyone interested in the first place at all.

I mean, on this project, everyone passed, no one wanted to make it.

And then Hulu finally stepped up and said, "Yeah, yeah, we'll do this."

And it was, I'm so grateful to Hulu.

And I think Hulu is having this incredible run right now for the last two years.

Their original programming is really terrific and really interesting, and it's not surprising that they were the ones that stepped up to make this when no one else wanted to make it.

So because it's so difficult and so all consuming, and I can only work on a few, the bar is extremely high.

And in this case, I thought this story was so powerful, so shocking, you had a pharma company that was lying through their teeth saying that an addictive drug was non-addictive.

And because of their deception, something occurred called the opioid crisis.

That, you know, hundreds of thousands of people have died.

Millions of lives have been ruined.

Millions of families have been ruined, all because a very, very small group of people, maybe seven, maybe eight people in one company deceived the country about their drug so that they could make money.

Now that's a great, awful, profound story, but what takes it to another level is how they were able to co-op the institutions of the US government to do this.

And so there, the story goes from a crime story to a story that is profound about the darkest natures of American capitalism.

And what it has to say about the revolving door and the relationship between industry and government and the people that are supposed to be regulating companies like Purdue Pharma to protect the American people, how they often are looking after that company's interest over the American people's interests.

Why does that happen?

That's an awful thing that happens.

And this is an extreme, extreme example of how destructive that could be.

So that's for me what took it over the edge of, wow, there's two stories here, there's a terrifying, fascinating crime story that I think I could dramatize in a dynamic way that would keep an audience engaged and excited to watch the show, and then there's this other story on top of it, which is the darkest nature of the US government's collusion with private industry.

- Danny, we've got about 30 seconds left here.

You know, I'm curious, what are you working on now?

Obviously, Dopesick is out.

What's next for you?

- Yeah, I'm being a little tight-lipped about it.

I've got a few projects.

I kind of don't like to talk about them at this stage because it's very early.

I don't want to give it away so that nine other writers in Hollywood, if they're thinking about doing the same thing, are gonna be like, "Oh, I need to hurry mine."

(Jim and Wayne laugh) Working on this, so I use, you know, at a certain point, I don't have anything that's in the hopper that I'm writing that's close enough to talk about.

However, I'm also, I have a TV company now, and we're producing lots of projects that we're trying to get made.

And it's a dynamic company that focuses on TV shows that push social issues, that diversity, shining a light on people that often don't get mainstream treatment in television.

So I've got a number of really cool projects on that front as well that other writers are writing.

So it's a neat slate.

Everything is based around, you know, something historical, social justice, social injustice, for the most part, and just still pushing forward on that front with my storytelling.

I feel like I'm personally, you know, I'm a conservative person, not politically, but just, you know, I don't have tattoos, I'm not cool, there's nothing punk rock about me.

I'm a bit of a people pleaser, but in my work, I like to be provocative.

I like to really say something.

I like to be kind of everything I'm not in my personal life.

And so I'm continuing that, you know, with either my own writing or with other people and trying to get their punk ideas and their crusades against the system made as well.

So it's neat that I have a platform that I can hopefully get some other stories made from other people at the same time.

- Oh, Danny, we are grateful for all of it.

He is Danny Strong.

The show now is Dopesick, and it's on Hulu.

It's exceptional television.

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you want to know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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