2023: Annoyed and Uninspired

What I liked and didn't like.

Right about now there’s a lot of “year end” trends from all the big outlets. Songs. Movies. Art. Cacio e pepe. Ozempic. Generic Adderall. I don’t really consume drugs anymore, so instead I consume media. A lot of media. Can’t get enough articles. Article Addict Anonymous. The Bill W. of reading stuff. Unlike drugs, I actually I like to share the articles and stuff I’m consuming. In the old newsletter, I’d often write about stuff I’m reading, movies and shows I’m watching. I want to get back in the groove of doing that so here’s a 2023 wrap.

I don’t know whether I’m caught in a grey slog. Midwestern doldrums. Looking back on 2023, I can only recall a few things that I really liked. That really made me feel something. I don’t think anything this year came close to suprassing Avatar 2 or Tár. I’m forver on the Tármac. Probably one of the best things I watched this year was “Godzilla Minus One.” The Japanese film had an irresistable sense that it knew exactly what it was. It had heart. It went all the way. So one of my resolutions for 2024 is to tweet less and write more on here and other places like Letterboxd (you can find me there: Zachary_Siegel).

Watching movies and shows this year about my central preoccupation—opioids and addiction—felt increasingly not fun and unenjoyable. A lot of this viewing actually felt like homework. The show “Painkiller” on Netflix was especially bad. Heavy handed. Moralistic. So deeply incurious and uncomplicated. These shows simply do not trust their audience. And so they explicitly telegraph who and what is good (blue collar workers who got injured on the job) and who and what is bad (Big Pharma). If things were so simple, then this kinda stuff wouldn’t happen.

All these big film and TV swings at pharma and opioids are essentially a bad rip off The Big Short. The “opioid epidemic” was and reamins to be a problem pretaining to America’s regulatory state. The FDA and DEA are ostensibly there to make sure the medicines we take are safe and effective. And that the system of prescribing remains table, meaning a doctor writes you a script and you goto a pharmacy to get it filled and take that medicine. This all sounds incredibly dull, but it is precisely this system that completely imploded during the early wave of the overdose crisis.

The government lost control of controlled substances. The Sackler’s main crime, which doesn’t really come through in these dramas because it’s actually a difficult thing to narrativize, is knowing precisely how to exploit America’s thin, hollowed out, and very weak regulatory state. And that’s just not a very sexy Netflix style crime. It’s a crime committed by lawyers and lobbyists and C-suite suits and Ronald Reagan over many decades. It’s a long and slow crime that certainly transcends this one dumb family and their fake innovation on oxycodone (that’s what kind of gets me everytime, is that the sole ingredient in OxyContin is old, generic, off-patent oxycodone).

So, what are these shows for then? What are they doing? What are they making us feel?

Since The Sackler’s are still very much billionaires and never going to see the inside of a prison cell for any of this, that means the only form of justice left is in the realm of culture. Tarnish the family name. Strip their prestige off the walls of The Met and The Guggenheim. Kick them out of New York’s elite. Follow Nan Goldin around and make a big stink at museums and galleries (No knock on Nan, she donated a really expensive drug checking machine to harm reduction programs. I like her style. It’s just, I don’t really care about museums and who they name the King Tutankhamun exhibit after). I felt similarly read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, “Empire of Pain.” That all of this is mostly about removing the Sackler family from New York’s high society.

And this mode of exacting cultural justice is hard to stomach given how many people are actually dying. There’s a material problem that demands our attention, and it’s not happening inside of New York museums and private clubs. But that’s where the only power is. Thus, these shows and movies about opioids are really dealing in the realm of fantasy and wish-fulfillment. To watch and enjoy this family falling from their high castle on TV. In “Painkiller,” you get to watch Purdue’s CEO Richard Sackler get beat up and pummled by his uncle Arthur for “ruining the family name.” And by the way, the uncle is dead and is an actual ghost in the show. That’s actually in the show! Yikes.

So, for 2024, let’s just not do these Big Short rip offs anymore. They’re cooked. Done. Bye-bye!

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Books. Fiction. The two best books I read in 2020 were Jordan Harper’s gritty crime novel “Everybody Knows” and Bret Easton Ellis’s autofiction horror/thriller “The Shards.” Both novels take place in Los Angeles. Both thrummed with mystery and intrigue. Both contained a lot of scenes and characters where drugs were important. These books detailed drugs in fun and exciting ways. Both of these books should absolutely be made into shows or movies. The Shards is in development at HBO. I’m in multiple group chats about it We’re all speculating who is going to play the elite private prep school boys. There’s the closeted, obsessive, paranoid, writerly (and murderous?) Bret. And the hot, mercurial, damaged Robert Mallory. Jacob Elordi? Austin Butler?

Books. Non-fiction. If you’ve been reading my work this past year then you’ll recognize this title: “Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs,” by the historian Matthew Lassiter, a giant doorstopper chronicling the making of drug laws in the 1950s. The book argues that white middle-class and suburban young people are repeatedly cast, politically and in the media, as the drug war’s primal victims. This incredibly relevant now, given the latest trends in fentanyl deaths. Over the past few years, deaths among younger people have spiked. Not because there is some massive wave of young people doing drugs, but because the drugs they’re using are much more dangerous, i.e. counterfeit pills that contain fentanyl.

Anyone buying pills on the street must know that it’s highly likely that those pills did not originate from a pharmacy or medicine cabinent. Instead, the pills come from clandestine labs that make powerful fentanyls pressed into familiar-looking pills. It’s resulted in one of the grimmest and deadliest turns of this crisis since I started covering it almost 10 years ago.

I wrote about all this at length in what was probably my biggest feauture of the year, a print story for The New Republic, about grieving parents enlisting themselves as activists on either side of the drug war. Some bend toward favoring more harsh and punitive criminal drug laws. Others land on the side of supporting public health and harm reduction. Though it’s impossible to pinpoint just one reason why people choose to believe in one side or the other, I found in this case that blame is central.

Who did the parents blame for their child’s untimely and sudden death? Those who blamed drug dealers, percieved as greedy, deceptive, and malicious, advocated for more criminal laws. Those who blamed “the system,” meaning prohibition and stigma and aggressive drug enforcement, they became advocates for a more robust public health and harm reduction safety net.

Lassiter’s painstaking and exhaustive history shows that this blend of family pain, grief, and blame has been foundational to drug laws from the very beginning. And, knowing Lassiter’s history, this grief gets weaponized by media and politics, which usually does not end well for anybody. I don’t like to make predictions, but my sense is that in 2024 we’ll see the spirit that produced Oregon’s drug decrim ballot or that built New York’s overdose prevention centers remain very much remain on the defensive. The adoption of a public health and harm reduciton strategy toward drug use has made a lot of gains over the years. But it all feels quite fragile, and like nowhere close to enough.

I think without far more resources for people suffering from addiction, mental illness, and unstable housing, there will be an acute loss of patience and tolerance for their plight. I hope in 2024 there is more done for people beyond tolerating and containing. Everyone deserves so much more than that.

Things have been annoying. And I’ve felt uninspired. Maybe that’s not the happiest note to end on. But if we don’t think things can be better, than what are we even doing here? I’m reminded of this line from Kafka.

“There is an infinite amount of hope,” he allegedly says. “Only not for us.”

Happy New Year,

Zach