“Painkiller”: Our Addiction Is to Money
Drugs are not the root cause of addiction; greed is
On August 10, Netflix released its new mini-series “Painkiller” about the tragedy related to the drug OxyContin distributed by the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma.
This drug, which is an opioid, is known for being highly addictive. It started to be prescribed by doctors all over the United States in the 90s mainly to treat pain.
Thus, it targets those who are vulnerable the most, dealing with acute or chronic pain, which is something truly challenging, as anybody who experienced it can tell. It’s almost impossible to resist something that can relieve the pain, even if we end up addicted to it.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), OxyContin has similar effects as drugs such as heroin, having as one of its “street names” Hillbilly Heroin.
By the way, the National Institute on Drug Abuse informs that the use of prescription drugs such as this one is a key factor in starting heroin use.
As “Painkiller” shows on several occasions, OxyContin resembles other illegal drugs also in the way by which it’s used in some cases for those who are addicted to it: snorting or intravenously (injections).
It’s believed that this drug is at the core of the opioid crisis in the United States and that it has contributed to some degree to the death of at least 300.000 people.
Here I don’t want to talk about the mini-series itself or the criticism of it, that it’s too similar to “Dopesick”, which is said to do a better job at telling this story.
I also won’t focus on drug addiction or other details regarding the story told in “Painkiller”.
For better or worse, in this article I want to explore something different and broader: what’s really behind this kind of tragedy.
“Painkiller” shows that when it started to become clear that OxyContin was a huge public health problem, Purdue Pharma planned to blame the users and abusers of this drug, as a strategy to try to get off the hook.
However, as alluring as this discourse may be, we know that it’s probably not true.
But there’s more to this story than just concluding that those who distribute drugs, even legally, are responsible for the deaths of those who use their products.
To me what “Painkiller” shows in quite a clear way is that there is another “addiction” behind most addictions, from drugs to social media: greed.
The “addiction” that causes problems such as drug addiction is not to the drugs themselves but to money.
Let me be clear about what I mean by this: those things to which we are addicted the most, such as drugs (prescribed or not) and social media usually don’t reach us out of the blue.
On the contrary, they are created to be addictive by design and, worst of all, are marketing in the smartest possible way.
The thing is that the creation and distribution of these sources of addiction come from wealthy people, who already have far more than enough money, that have no reason whatsoever to crave more of it.
Therefore, it seems that those people are truly “addicted” to this fiction created only to ease the exchange of goods (money).
They are always wanting more and more money, way beyond the need level; they just cannot help themselves, even if to have their fix others are hurt.
Maybe this behavior can be considered an addiction even from a more formal standpoint. According to the American Association of Addiction Medicine, this is the definition of addiction:
Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.
I am not a doctor and therefore I am not able to tell whether that kind of behavior toward money really is an addiction. When I use this word, of course, I am doing so in an anecdotal way.
There are several instances in the mini-series in which its characters question exactly what I am talking about here: are we doing all of these bad things just so we can make more money? What is it about money that we, like junkies, just cannot have enough of it?
It doesn’t seem that people such as those who control companies like Purdue Pharma are in any danger of starving, to the point of consciously deciding to sell a drug that could potentially kill thousands of people, besides destroying the lives of their families in the process.
All of this makes me remind of Marcus Aurelius’ forgotten lessons in “Meditations”, that evil is a plague, and that we were designed to help others, not to harm them.
At the same time, it’s pretty comfortable to think that this is only a thing that those in power, like politicians and wealthy people, would do, that we are superior to them from a moral standing point in this specific regard. But are we, really?
Don’t we already have more than enough? Are we at any reasonable risk of not having what to eat, where to live, and what to wear?
Then why keep all this competitiveness, this urge to have more and more, even if to do so we somehow contribute to the suffering of others and spend less time with our dear ones, besides harming our physical and mental health?
I know it may sound strange to think that we, at the bottom of this system, are contributing to other people’s suffering.
But documentaries such as The True Cost and Cowspiracy are pretty clear that it’s exactly our urge to make more money and spend it on things we don’t need that may add to things like terrible working conditions, cruelty against animals, and global warming. The first chapters of the book The Moneyless Man are also clear about this.
As a lawyer, I totally believe that the law and government agents can help to deal with those “money addicts” who are in power. I am also sure that their “addiction” is clearer than ours, and that it is easier to spot the madness of relentlessly pursuing money when one already has so much of it.
The problem is that by focusing only on those people we can waste an excellent opportunity to see that we are suffering from this same “addiction”, even if it’s to a milder degree.
With this behavior, we may end up acting like those addicts that don’t believe they have a problem and hence don’t seek treatment.
Things get more complicated when we notice that pretty much everybody is on the same boat, suffering from the very same “addiction” (money), as it happens with social media, which is another example of the wreckage caused by the greed of those who already have a lot.
If almost everyone is facing the same types of “addiction”, for example, to money and social media, what’s the cure for them, and who can help us to find a way out of it?
This is an almost impossible question to answer, and I see it firsthand. I’ve been reading lots of books and consuming other types of content on curbing social media usage, living simply, minimalism, frugality, and so on.
I also experience all the horrible effects caused by these addictions in my own life, from increased anxiety, burnout, and knee and back pain from sitting down too much to work, all the way up to more serious issues.
Still, I haven’t found a way to solve this puzzle. I simply cannot get rid of these “addictions”.
Sometimes I think I finally got it, but soon I catch myself using screens far more than necessary and striving to make more money than I need, not being satisfied with having and making just enough.
