Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Painkiller’ is a fictional retelling of a true story that impacted America’s healthcare system. It begins with Richard Sackler at Purdue Pharma. He proposes a new drug that is much more potent than morphine and can help deal with chronic pain. However, Sackler wishes the doctors to prescribe the drug to anyone with any kind of pain, no matter if they actually need OxyContin. His blind greed for money pushes the country towards a crisis that turns into an epidemic as addiction rates increase and many lives are lost. A group of people works to bring down Sackler and Purdue. They look for an insider who can expose the company and its wrongdoings. This is where Deborah Marlowe comes in.
Deborah Marlowe is Based on a Real Secretary
The character of Deborah Marlowe in ‘Painkiller’ is based on the real secretary of Purdue’s general counsel, Howard Udell. The show uses an alias for her, and her real name has not been revealed anywhere, meaning that she wishes to remain anonymous. She was mentioned in Patrick Radden Keefe’s non-fiction book, ‘Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,’ in which he used the alias Martha West to tell her story. West started working at Purdue in 1979 as a legal secretary. In 1999, she was tasked with researching the abuse of OxyContin. As stated in the book, West said: “[Udell] asked me to go on the internet and go into the newsgroups.”
She had to find out how people were misusing OxyContin. She used the pseudonym, Ann Hedonia, to log in and discovered that people were crushing the tablets and snorting the powder to get high. Some were cooking it and shooting it through needles. West forwarded her findings in a memo that went to the senior officials in the company, but no one took notice of it. West started using OxyContin when her boss advised her to take the drug for her back pain due to an injury she had from a car accident. At first, it started as the usual medicine, but then, it turned into an addiction. She talked about it at length in her 2004 deposition.
West said: “I found that it didn’t work for the length of period that it was supposed to. If I wanted enough relief, you know, instant relief, enough to go to work so I could go to work and function through the day, I had to make it immediate release.” She used her knowledge from the internet forums and started snorting OxyContin pills by crushing them. Slowly, as the addiction took over, West got worse. Both her personal and professional lives were affected by it. The addiction further stretched to other drugs, like cocaine. When the problem started reflecting on her work, she said she was fired from Purdue for “poor work performance.”
West explained that she wasn’t even allowed to retrieve her personal files from the computer. Later, she added, the memo she had written to her superiors was nowhere to be found. Though she tried suing Purdue, it didn’t go anywhere. At the deposition, Purdue’s lawyers went after West’s credibility as a witness. Her history of addiction was called into question, and it was highlighted that OxyContin wasn’t her only choice of drugs. Her words against the company were presented as nothing more than a disgruntled ex-employee. Things went downhill for West, and she didn’t show up to testify at the trial.
As shown in the Netflix series, John Brownlee’s investigation team had reached out to her, and she told them about the memo. She was set to appear before the grand jury in Abingdon but never showed up. She vanished the evening before her testimony and was later found by her lawyer in an emergency room. She went there, begging for painkillers. Nothing else is known about West after this. We hope she got the help she needed and got better. She has remained an essential part of the process of exposing Purdue. However, she wishes to remain anonymous and away from the media spotlight.
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