Tragedies Happen to Rural White People

I’m sorry, kid. You were born poor. But you don’t have to stay that way.

Let’s be blunt here: No one in the middle class really cares about what happens to poor people, of any race, in America, and what’s interesting is that when “public health crises” arise in minority and poor populations they are never really seen as a problem worthy enough to get the middle-class up in arms about until those “public health crises” start impacting the middle class.

The synopsis:

A small-town pharmacist stakes a mission to save his community long before the opioid epidemic gains nationwide attention.

Two things about this trailer right off the bat:

  1. The rural opioid epidemic, which has led inexorably to the rural heroin epidemic, is not something that the core Netflix audience is going to care too much about, beyond glancing at this for two minutes.
  2. “Big” private organizations are always targeted by leftist outfits like Netflix: “Big pharma,” “Big oil,” “Big banks,” but usually not “Big” public organizations like “Big government,” “Big Hollywood” or, these days “Big social media.”

It makes you wonder why.

This Pharmacist Was Only Trying To Get Answers

When a child dies before a parent does it is usually seen as a human tragedy.

Dude just wants answers to why his kid died.

When the pharmacist of a small town goes around asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about how systems of addiction, incarceration, and death lock together in rural America, then it’s usually seen by middle-class folks as conspiracy-mongering.

It’s not clear from the trailer which side the Netflix documentary series is going to come down on, but there might be a hint right around the 1:10 mark in the trailer.

What Are We To Make of All of This?

The opioid epidemic that is ripping through the small town and rural communities in America and that has been supported through heroin, fentanyl, and other drugs from such wonderful vacation spots as China and Pakistan is not going away.

Everywhere in the West, pill-popping is a problem.

But, because it primarily impacts rural, poor, white people, don’t look for any information in this Netflix documentary series to make too much of stir in the minds and hearts of the middle-class, Progressive, viewership that Netflix has as its subscriber base.

The Pharmacist drops on February 5, 2020, on Netflix.