I'm Jonathan K. Parton. Welcome to K-PART. On August 10th, the Supreme Court granted

the Justice Department's request to temporarily block a bankruptcy plan for Purdue Pharma,

the maker of OxyContin that would use billions to help address the opioid crisis while

also shielding its Sacra family owners from future lawsuits. This news comes as a limited

series detailing the Sacra family's aggressive efforts to profit from OxyContin, despite the

havoc it was wreaking across the country, streams on Netflix. The series is called Painkiller,

and its director is Pete Berg. In this conversation, first recorded for Washington Post's Live

on August 11th, Pete Berg talks about the personal reason he did this series, how money blinded

everyone from the Sacklers to doctors to the FDA, and how he got around the initial disclosure

requirement for each episode of Painkiller.

And I thought that it might be interesting if legal would approve it for us to see if

we could find parents of children who had died because of OxyContin. We did the standard

disclaimer, put it aside and say, but what is not fiction is that my 20-year-old son died

of an OxyContin overdose, or my 30-year-old daughter. I thought that if the parents would

be willing to do it, it might be very, very effective and powerful. And legal said, yes.

So, how did this series come together? How did you decide, why did you decide to bring

this story to life?

Right. I mean, I've lost people to addiction. I've had friends and some family members

either die because of opioids, narcotics, alcohol, or get very derailed. So, the idea

of addiction is something that's personal to me. Some of my great creative heroes from

Chris Cornell to Tom Petty, to probably my biggest hero when I was a bit younger in school

Prince also come to opioid addiction. And it was a subject that I felt strongly about.

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