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Whenever you check out a documentary lately, such as the crime ones we see so often, I can bet that you think about when the producers first started shooting. They must’ve seen something unique or extraordinary within the interviewees themselves.
A good example would be Dan Schneider – the star, and I do not overstate here, – to The Pharmacist, Netflix’s new rollicking four-part series. Dan Schneider is a grey haired, open-hearted bear of a man who is ready to tell his shattering story. While telling his account, he often weeps and prays to God, as he recalls his traumatic experiences. Unlike many other people, Dan has one impressive traits – he has tape recorded everything he had gone through. Because Dan Schneider had documented all of his trauma on tonarryshow direcly irrefragable, The Pharmacist is immeasurabily real. Most documentaries however, do lack this strong sense.
What was Schneider’s struggle? It all started when his adult son Danny was brutally murdered. His life as a mild-mannered Louisiana pharmacist changed in 1999. Danny was a crack addict who had moved out of St Bernard Parish, the family’s comfortable home in New Orleans, to a worse part of town known as Ninth Ward.
Schneider was not happy about the lack of police focus on the case. His self-preservation instincts were mentally blocked due to his strong grief. Schneider chose to investigate the matter on his own. He began searching for witnesses and suspects despite the whole world advising him against it. Schneider went out of his way to preserve evidence for a possible trial. He recorded all phone calls and even spoke his private thoughts into a recorder, simulating a voice over the story.
In episode two of The Pharmacist, he reveals that the prelude of the episode was in fact Sandy’s murder and that the account of how Schneider’s son was killed is far more sinister in astonishing ways. What kept his story chilling were the countless twists it took.
Schneider’s investigations proceeded beyond the murder. His job lent itself handy to investigating an even more serious issue than crack: opioids. Oxycontin prescriptions are way too frequent with far too many patients that are physically young and healthy. When a user too young, coupled with a morbidly low life expectancy, appears on the news, Schneider grabs his audio equipment and entrepreneur-like curiosity. He remembers his son and thinks about how this single rogue doctor is letting young people like Danny die at a premature age. But some of them can be rescued unlike Danny.
What comes after is an in-depth web of medical, corporate, and law enforcement espionage. Schneider exposes them with dogged determination. The phrase “you’re kidding me” which is common among fans of crime documentaries is constantly used in this work. One example is when a simple piece of investigative work makes the DEA, FBI, and local sheriff look clueless. Schneider, the Pharmacist, wins all the more important, and for dramatic impact, leaves some of them off camera.
Schneider isn’t the only one who’s remarkable: There are other intriguing talking heads in the show, including a reformed big-pharma drug representative who, halfway through the series, suddenly yells, “That wasn’t the end! That was … the beginning!”
Now, the last couple of episodes bring us to the actual focus of The Pharmacist, which is turning out to be a account of the American opioid crisis and attempting to break down the national scale epidemic from where Schneider so eloquently put it. This is a gargantuan tale of capitalist avarice that borders on the inhumane and is being meticulously chronicled in these pages. It is adding the missing part of the puzzle about how tobacco was fraudulently marketed over a century ago. The ironic part is that while the scandal goes national, the bland Louisiana pharmacist does what he does with it; he uses that same grumpy, gung-ho common sense to help mitigate the flood.
The Pharmacist presents an urgent case that concerns the entire world, however, like with all television coverage, it boils down to one person. Schneider, who has always been somewhat subdued (the program does not forget the young Danny’s sorrow) but still maintains his faith and desire to mend the broken pieces, possesses the self-awareness to make him a phenomenal documentary subject. “I was driven,” he enigmatically states, out of the many self-reflecting comments that he offers regarding his motives for his actions. “Other people would say ‘obsessed.’”
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