A Wild West story set in the Sunshine State, “American Pain” uses the outrages of Chris and Jeff George —identical twins and the most entrepreneurial of Florida’s “pill mill” operators of the late 2000s—to frame the most tragic aspects of the opioid epidemic. Mr. Foster has an advantage in the fact that the Georges were already convicted and that they and their cohort have served their sentences (with the exception of Jeff George, who is interviewed by phone from prison). No one involved in their South Florida Pain Clinic—or its alias, American Pain—has any reservations about revealing details of the audacious business model on which the Georges built their operation, which federal investigators say was allowed to thrive thanks to a network of complicit doctors, suppliers and manufacturers. Transcripts of FBI phone taps reveal a laissez-faire attitude toward the costs of opioid addiction. “People have always overdosed,” says one George twin; “you’d have to be an idiot to get hit by a train,” says another, after a carload of customers was crushed just after leaving the clinic.

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