The pharmacist today has earned for many people a certain divine status. Specially in Yankeeland. In 2020 it is very easy to hear in almost any American rap song constant allusions to trendy candies: xanax, oxycodone, percozet, codeine... Drugs as dangerous as heroin but which, having a prescription, have a barrier to entry much more flexible. This is not a game. the rapper Juice Wrld, without going any further, passed away in December from an oxycodone overdose. The timing of the new Netflix documentary could not be better. We are at the beginning of the century, a pharmacist's son dies (not of an overdose, but of gunshots in the camel neighborhood of New Orleans), and the man decides to do something about it.
Review of The Pharmacist: One Man Against an Entire Industry.
Dan Schneider, the recording man who wanted to avenge his son
One of the most striking (and fundamental) aspects of The pharmacist is that it is starring recorder man. Comments Dan Scheneider, courageous father of the boy killed at the age of 22 while shopping crack, who had the habit of recording everything. More than for his subsequent fight against pharmaceutical laboratories and the high content of opiates in his formulas, The pharmacist stands out for this huge amount of documentary material at the service of history. And not only in conversations:
“Sometimes I had no one to talk to. And better than talking was just talking to the recorder»
We are used to this display when it comes to police phone conversations to add color to a crime documentary. But, a civilian who has recorded each and every one of his calls and who even has microphones in the car? This is new.
Serialized documentary in the purest style making a murderer
Despite the informative summary of the first minutes of the documentary, The pharmacist follows the path and essence of documentary series Don't fuck with cats o Troy palm grove. The information is supplied little by little and obeying the premises of the fiction:
- Progressive alternation of good and bad news for the protagonist and his main objective
- Increasing focus opening of the initial premise of the story and even dead ends that end up giving masterful script twists.
- Appearance of new plots; characters that seemed secondary acquire central protagonism.
The surprise ending of the first episode clearly shows the care and ambition with which the structure of the plot of the The pharmacist. Also cheats (or what many might consider cheats).
The information in The pharmacist it is conveniently selected and, if interested, omitted to reveal it later and thus multiply the stupor in the public. Although the story is true, there are many ways to unfold it, and on Netflix they have opted for a risky one. Wait, restlessness, tension and surprises. It is not an orthodox documentary.
War on drugs and pharmaceutical laboratories
the premise with which it has been advertised The pharmacist (one man fighting an entire industry) it really starts in the second episode and with a total role of oxycodone. Specifically, the focus falls on a medicine that the protagonist of the documentary sells to many young people in which he, he says, begins to see the face of his deceased son when he attends to them. The drug in question is a pain reliever in which "a single pill contains the equivalent of 16 percozets", as he comments in the second episode of The pharmacist one of the specialized sources.
Danny, the pharmacist, starts to feel bad about so many children buying him legal drugs at the pharmacy. Danny begins to act as a guide and medical adviser. Unofficially and from the counter of his pharmacy without the boss knowing. Something does not fit him, but it is not until the death of his son that the light bulb went on.
In that same second chapter, a young woman describes the medicine as «heroin pill«. Although the initial idea of the treatment is that a single dose acts in the body for twelve hours, tricks soon begin to circulate to achieve an "instant high". Danny discovers that some of his clients were chewing the pill, removing the protective film or even heating it to dissolve it and then injecting it.
Pawn of the pharmaceutical industry, he begins to realize that, indirectly, he may have killed as many people from his pharmacy as heroin has from the streets. The same streets that took away his son. That is when, in addition, the courageous father begins to detect abnormal behavior. People with unusual movements and interesting responses. slippery
That's when then it begins The pharmacist.