I saw Michael Keaton and Rosario Dawson the other night, and I was reminded, yet again, of a fundamental reality of American politics: Donald Trump betrayed Trump Country.

The occasion was the premiere of a new Hulu series, Dopesick, a drama based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Beth Macy that explores the opioid crisis through several intertwined story lines. The initial episode follows the Sackler family as it schemes to make billions of dollars by selling OxyContin as a non-addictive miracle painkiller; a country doctor in a southwestern Virginia mining town who is persuaded by a slick Purdue Pharma rep to start prescribing the drug; a DEA agent who sees trouble brewing with the spread of oxy and suspects US government regulators of being in cahoots with the company; and a pair of assistant US attorneys convinced that Purdue Pharma is committing some kind of a crime. Keaton is the kindly doctor who’s about to enter a nightmare, and Dawson is the DEA agent battling the system. It’s gripping television, with a compelling script from series creator Danny Strong and a strong overarching vision from director Barry Levinson.

Strong, Keaton, Dawson, and other stars of the show—as well as Warren Littlefield, the legendary television exec who produced Dopesick—were at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC, on Thursday night to unveil and discuss the series. Keaton talked about how his character, a man trying to do good but misled by the forces of corporate greed, is damaged by the crisis. Dawson recounted growing up on the Lower East Side in New York City and how drug addiction affected her family. Strong recalled how he had struggled to understand Richard Sackler, the billionaire CEO of Purdue, and the motivations that propelled him to deceive the nation about OxyContin. Did Sackler actually believe the false hype that the drug offered a safe and effective option for millions who suffered from chronic pain? Did he really need more money? Strong told us he went so far as to visit a therapist and role-play that he was Sackler. “It helped—and made me feel better about myself,” he quipped.

Much of the action in the first episode takes place in gritty coal country, for, as the show informs us, Purdue identified Virginia, Kentucky, and other mining areas, where many workers must contend with the relentless physical hardships of scraping compressed carbon out of the ground, as ideal initial test markets for OxyContin. And in a diabolical way, the company got that right. The areas first targeted for oxy became the hot spots of the opioid crisis, as we can see from this New York Times map of overdose deaths in 2016—two decades after the drug was aggressively marketed to those communities.

Appalachia became a belt of devastation and death due to the spread of oxy and other highly addictive opioids. And here’s where Trump enters the picture. In 2016, he campaigned fiercely to win in coal country, claiming he would revive the coal industry, and, with opioid overdoses surging in key electoral states—including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Ohio—he promised that he would end this crisis as president.

He didn’t. In October 2017, Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, stating, “We are going to overcome addiction in America.” But Trump did not keep his previous promise of taking the more significant step of designating the opioid crisis a “national emergency,” and he did not at that time allocate additional funds for dealing with it. (Under a “national emergency” declaration, Trump could have tapped into more federal funds to combat opioid abuse.) His administration did adopt a few positive policies. In 2018, he signed legislation to boost spending on drug treatment. Yet the Trump administration never got a handle on this deadly problem. Opioid deaths set a record in 2019, topping 50,000. In December of that year, the Government Accountability Office released a report slamming the Trump administration for not establishing a national opioid strategy, as required by law. And the budget he submitted to Congress in early 2020 proposed cutting funding to federal programs that fight opioid addiction.

In October 2020, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s “irregular commitment” to beating back opioid addiction was “exemplified by the unsteady performance of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the government’s flagship agency in the fight against drug abuse.” The newspaper noted:

Trump has run the office much the way he has approached governance in general, showing skepticism, ambivalence and a lack of focus according to government audits, documents and drug policy specialists. Under his leadership, ONDCP employees have cycled out and failed to marshal a cohesive and measurable anti-drug plan. It served as a way station for political appointees, documents and interviews show.

Hard to believe, right? Trump was not serious about doing the hard work necessary for dealing with the opioid epidemic. Overdose deaths from opioids increased to an estimated 69,710 in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic was obviously a factor, but Trump’s policies, which predated the pandemic, were clearly falling short. He was screwing his own people—just as he did with his inept response to the coronavirus crisis. (By the way, Trump did not revive the coal industry. Coal mining employment, as of late 2020, was down 23.6 percent from the level at the start of Trump’s presidency, and coal production had decreased 31.5 percent.)

Worse, and not surprising, the Trump administration went easy on the Sacklers. In October 2020, his Justice Department reached a settlement with Purdue, under which the firm agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges related to its marketing of OxyContin and faced about $8.3 billion in fines. The Sackler family, which was worth an estimated $13 billion, only had to cover $225 million in civil penalties—a pittance for them—without acknowledging any wrongdoing. State attorneys general who were then suing Purdue complained the settlement was too lenient for the company and the family. It looked as if the Trump administration had rushed to get the deal done before the election. Trump wasn’t seeking justice for the millions of Americans harmed or killed by the Sackler’s malfeasance. He was looking for a campaign talking point.

Last month, Purdue Pharma was dissolved in bankruptcy proceedings that required the Sacklers to hand over $4.5 billion to address the opioid crisis. But the family banked about $10 billion from OxyContin, and under this settlement, the Sacklers will remain one of the richest families in the United States—and be absolved of Purdue’s OxyContin-related liabilities. Again, they got off easy.

At the Aspen Institute, Strong noted that one aim of Dopesick is to hold the Sacklers accountable, and, judging from the first episode, it succeeds on that front. But even though the series doesn’t cover the recent years of the crisis, another takeaway is that Trump abandoned the very people and communities he professed to care about. Both he and the Sacklers conned Trump Country.

Got any comments on the above story—or anything else? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.

Join an Online This Land Salon!

On Thursday night, I will host the first online salon for a conversation with This Land readers. (Yikes!) What’s on the agenda? News of the day, news of the week, or almost anything else. All you have to do is show up and maybe have a few thoughts about what you’d like to discuss. There’s one main rule: civil discourse. We will mute people who don’t abide. This is an experiment, so let’s see what happens. The Zoom information and passcode is below. We’re operating under the honor system, so please don’t share it with people who are not This Land readers. (I’m trusting you all.) I look forward to seeing you 8:00 pm, EDT, October 14, 2021.

Join the Zoom meeting here:

https://motherjones.zoom.us/j/83922162039?pwd=ZWpRcW5hdERHL2ppdExxdFFNeXpyQT09

Meeting ID: 839 2216 2039

Passcode: 487970

Dial by your location:

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Find your local number: https://motherjones.zoom.us/u/kdgMzcTXSn

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. You think you had a tough time coping with isolation during the pandemic? Consider the experiences of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men who set sail in August 1914 for Antarctica to cross the continent by foot and ended up stuck in an ice drift for 10 months. After their ship was crushed, Shackleton and the others were forced to survive on the ice for yet another six months. He and several of the men then hit the open and perilous seas in a makeshift boat for a 750-mile trek to an island with a whaling station. Meanwhile, the rest of the expedition hunkered down on a craggy sliver of land and waited. Four months later, Shackleton returned with a rescue vessel and miraculously found everyone still alive. It’s an epic tale of fortitude. Alfred Lansing’s account, first published in 1959 and based largely on interviews with crew members and the diaries they kept, is a fast-paced and bracing read. It’s nearly impossible to believe. And though few of us will ever confront such extreme conditions, Lansing, an American journalist who worked for the United Press wire service, recreates an engrossing story that addresses the twin challenges of coping with adversity and monotony. After the pandemic lockdowns, this diary passage from the first officer carries a particular resonance: “Day passes day with very little or nothing to relieve the monotony. We take constitutionals round and round the floe but no one can go further as we are to all intense and purposes on an island. There is practically nothing fresh to read and nothing to talk about, all topics being absolutely exhausted...I never know what day of the week it is except when it is Sunday as we have Adelie [penguin] liver and bacon for lunch and is the great meal of the week and soon I shall not be able to know Sunday as our bacon will soon be finished. The [ice] pack around looks very much as it did four or five months ago.”

And some of us complained about not being able to get a haircut.

The Many Saints of Newark. When David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, decided to revisit his masterpiece, he had no choice but to look backward. A sequel would entail explaining the now-classic ambiguous final scene of the series that fans still argue about 14 years later. (Did Tony buy the farm after that abrupt cut to black?) And a what-happened-next approach was not on Chase’s to-do list. So, returning to Bada-Bingland required Chase to plot a prequel. And what Sopranos fan would not want to know the twists and turns that led Tony to become a crime boss confiding his troubles on a shrink’s couch? What an opportunity. Like finding an unattended truck full of booze just sitting on the side of the highway. Yet with The Many Saints of Newark, a two-hour-long HBO film, Chase and his crew did not make off with the goods.

The movie shows us Tony as a boy in 1967 and 1971, but the central character is Dickie Moltisanti, a wiseguy working in the DiMeo crime family with Tony’s dad. He’s the father of Christopher, who years later will be Tony’s mentee, whom he kills in perhaps the series’ most tragic scene. But now Christopher is in diapers, and Tony is just a kid who wants to hang with Dickie, play football, and drink beer. The problem with the movie is that Dickie isn’t that interesting. Sure, he lusts after his father’s young Italian bride and gets into a war with a former underling who’s running a Black crime gang. But Dickie is no more than a standard-issued Mafia movie lieutenant—which was certainly not true of the adult Tony. He’s hard to care about. The movie does come with some intriguing touches. Much of the action takes place against the Newark riots of 1967, with the Black Power movement creating conflict between the Italian mob and the local Black crime outfit. Christopher delivers from-the-grave narration—a cool idea that doesn’t fully deliver. To delight Soprano-heads, Chase serves up younger versions of Silvio, Paulie, and Pussy (though, alas, they bear a resemblance to the Three Stooges). Most important, the film never gives us enough about young Tony to make this origins story engaging. In one scene, a school administrator says to his mom he has leadership potential—she’s probably not thinking about Tony becoming a don—but there are no signs of this in the movie. The best thing about Many Saints is that it ends before Tony starts his climb up the Cosa Nostra career ladder. That means Chase will have another chance to return to the scene of the crime and pull off the job.

Got a show, book, film, or album to recommend? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.

Read Previous Issues of This Land

October 9, 2021: Can Trump and the GOP be stopped from shoving 1/6 into a memory hole?; how you can join a This Land online salon; the world premiere of Jill Sobule’s new song, “You Better Not F*ck in Texas”; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

October 5, 2021: The Democracy Crisis: Could this be Joe Biden’s big mistake?; kicking Pat Robertson on the way out; Skyfall vs. Casino Royale; a Velvet Underground tribute; and more.

October 2, 2021: How we almost got that big Lewandowski scoop; Dumbass Comment of the Week; MoxieCam™; and more.

September 29, 2021: Note to Greta Van Susteren: The road to hell is paved with both-siderism; the value of Netflix’s Worth; a crazy CIA story; and more.

September 25, 2021: What do Common, Leonard Bernstein, and Dwight Eisenhower have in common?; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

September 21, 2021: The Trump-Russia scandal denialists are taking another desperate stab at gaslighting you; Netflix’s The Chair nails the assignment; and more.

September 18, 2021: Hey Marco Rubio and Glenn Greenwald, this is the real problem with Milley, Trump, and nuclear weapons; Dumbass Comment of the Week (did Barack Obama really kill rock ’n’ roll with racial politics?); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™ (a new toy!); and more.

September 14, 2021: Will the new Bill-and-Monica television series spur a reappraisal of the Clinton scandal?; a stunning new Holocaust movie you can’t see—yet; one of the best articles ever about a family and its dog; and more.

September 11, 2021: How Trump’s conspiracy theories are killing people in West Virginia and elsewhere; more 9/11 reflections; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Special Confederacy Edition); a look at HBO’s very odd White Lotus; MoxieCam™; and more.

September 8, 2021: 9/11 plus 20: a remembrance and a thank-you; the chilling climate crisis warning in HBO’s Reminiscence; and more.

September 3, 2021: Texas shows how Trumpism has become fascistic vigilantism; Dumbass Comment of the Week; Rock ’n’ Roll Flashback (how I was popped by Iggy Pop); MoxieCam™; and more.

August 31, 2021: How a 1954 analysis perfectly explains today’s Republican Party; on his new album, James McMurtry captures the spirit of Warren Zevon; and more.