Doped (Season 20, Episode 8)
Premise: A pharmaceutical sales manager drives the wrong way up the West Side Highway with four children in her minivan, and what looks like a drunk-driving disaster proves to be a scheme to discredit a whistleblower.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 8
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Rich Sommer as Zach Marshall, Chris Bowers as Matt Sawyer, Sandra Joseph as Brenda Sawyer, Michael Countryman as Dr. Charles Price, Stephen Bogardus as Woodmoor executive Austin
- Ripped from the headlines
- The crash closely resembles the July 2009 Taconic State Parkway collision, in which Diane Schuler drove a minivan the wrong way and struck an SUV head-on, and the whistleblower plot reflects the wave of False Claims Act cases against drug companies at the time.
- Director
- Mario Van Peebles
- Writers
- Richard Sweren & Christopher Ambrose
Summary
The Investigation
“Doped” opens with Brenda Sawyer, a sales manager at Woodmoor Pharma, steering her minivan the wrong way up the West Side Highway and slamming head-on into a car, killing its three occupants and two of the children with her. Her niece Sarah Renquist dies at the hospital, and later so does Brenda. Grain alcohol is found in the van and her blood alcohol is .09, but her husband, Matt, swears she never drank. Brenda’s sister, Sandy, says her daughter Allie called from the van to say Brenda was confused and swerving.
Video shows Brenda sipping a drink at an ice cream stop, and her boss, Zach Marshall, recalls her joking about needing one. Her stomach holds grain alcohol mixed into a fruit smoothie, but a second look at her inflamed nasal passages leads the medical examiner to test her allergy spray, which was laced with propofol, a powerful anesthetic that dissipates too fast to detect. Woodmoor makes propofol.
Brenda’s assistant describes secretive late meetings with Marshall, and her son, Nicky, says her boss bought her a smoothie and phoned shortly before the crash. The smoothies went on Marshall’s company card, and an early 911 warning came from a Tuckahoe pay phone near where his cell was used. Hearing his own 911 call, Marshall breaks down and tries to kill himself in a restroom before Bernard stops him.
The Trial
Charged with seven counts of murder, Marshall soon switches to Hoyt, a lawyer the prosecutors assume Woodmoor is paying. The prosecutors learn that Brenda took her mother-in-law off Lextenda, a $1,000-a-day Woodmoor cancer drug on which most dying patients live only a week or two, after a patient’s son blamed it for draining his family’s savings. A clinic head who prescribes it to every terminal patient enjoys Woodmoor-paid golf trips.
When a judge quashes a subpoena for Brenda’s laptop, McCoy returns a Woodmoor executive’s campaign donation and threatens to name him an accomplice. The wiped laptop’s calendar lists a meeting with “J. Wigand,” which leads to an FDA official who expected an anonymous Woodmoor informant. A “Dr. Sherin” who later called the FDA about Lextenda proves to be Marshall, who used the alias to receive a vial of propofol from Woodmoor at a Dobbs Ferry mailbox.
Spoiler, the ending: Marshall confesses that he meant only to get Brenda arrested for drunk driving, ruining her credibility so he could claim the whistleblower reward she planned to donate, and that he panicked on learning the children were with her. He pleads guilty to depraved indifference murder on all seven counts for 20 years, a deal Matt accepts, and Matt asks that the reward go to Brenda’s sister, the other family and cancer research.
Why it stands out
- The killer disguises murder as drunk driving, spiking the victim’s smoothie with grain alcohol and her nasal spray with propofol, which standard toxicology screens miss.
- A calendar entry for “J. Wigand,” a nod to tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, reveals that the victim was about to go to the FDA.
- McCoy, now DA, hands back a drug company’s campaign contribution and blames industry money for stalling health care reform.