Beast of Two Backs

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“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.”

“It’s as if everybody’d made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let’s have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let’s all be good consumers and have a lot of togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality — and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we’ll all get busy and pretend it never happened.”

There is a notable absence of whistleblowers in the OxyContin story. This may be due to the fact that when people did attempt to blow the whistle, Purdue did its best to crush them, as company lawyers did to Karen White, the Florida saleswoman who lost her lawsuit against Purdue in 2005. But I came to believe that it was also a function of denial. I would spend hours talking with intelligent people who had worked at the company, and they could acknowledge all sorts of infirmities in the corporate culture and make astute observations about the personalities involved, but when it came to OxyContin’s role in the opioid crisis, they would do their best to explain it away. Even in the face of voluminous evidence, of guilty pleas to felony charges, of thousands of lawsuits, of study after study, of so many dead, they retreated to the old truths, about abuse versus addiction, about heroin and fentanyl. I wondered if, for some of these people, it was just too demoralising to take a sober measure of their own complicity, if it was simply too much for the human conscience to bear.

“Some people are never complete and are always lacking something. Others take a long time to form themselves.”

"Oh, he's fine! You're fine! This is fine! We're all fine!"