Nurse Jackie Jacked on Oxy’s

The new series starring Soprano’s Edie Falco started last week – and the first episode promises a very articulate and thoughtful series on addiction.  Nurse Jackie is a dedicated nurse with chronic back pain, and she has taken to having an affair with the pharmacist in the hospital so she’ll have easy access to OxyContin.  She doesn’t just pop pills – she pours out the grains and snorts them for a quicker and more intense reaction.

So far this looks like a more realistic portrayal of addiction in the medical field – unlike House, which although a great drama, does not really accurately portray how a hospital would react to an aggressively Vicodin-popping doctor. Nurse Jackie is the classic drug seeker – she has legitimate pain, but her path to relief is chaotic and destructive. No matter what pain you have – you can’t really live a normal life on increasing doses of heavy-duty opiate pain killers.  She is buond to make mistakes and put patients at risk. At one point she laments to an unconscious patient, “I’m almost killed you! I almost killed you!”  She is both horrified and resigned – in that classic between a rock and a hard place: she doesn’t know any other way to live.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about Oxycontin addiction – and the statistics are truly frightening.  This is one heavily abused drug and seems to be following the path of quaaludes, which were eventually banned altogether due to their wide-spread abuse.  We’ve certainly heard plenty of stories of celebrities dying due to prescription drug abuse (and oxys are often part of the mix), and the drug and it’s relatives have played a part in many other lurid celebrity tales (from Winona Ryder to OJ Simpson to Rush Limbaugh).

My hope is that Nurse Jackie will not glamorize addiction or make it cute and amusing the way House does (although House has taken a dark turn recently – and might address the issue more seriously) – and the first episode seems to indicate they have no intention of doing so.