Oxy Kingpins

Premiered at SXSW Film Festival, The Oxy Kingpins” is a documentary that feels like it could be a Martin Scorsese movie. It’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” meets “The Insider” — the story of a scurrilous illegal business, and one of the hotshot thrill junkies who rode it to riches, and how that business connects up to a much larger corporate racket. The big players, in this case, are the pharmaceutical distribution companies that dumped opioids onto the market, addicting countless people to OxyContin, a narcotic painkiller that’s really heroin with a “medical” image brand. The thrill junkie is Alex Dimattio, a drug dealer who grew up in New York City, where he dealt weed in Washington Square Park and heroin on the Lower East Side, only to discover that he could make a killing (with a lot less risk) by selling OxyContin pills.

- Owen Gleiberman - Variety

Additional Editor