Dopesick by Beth Macy

DOPESICK by Beth Macy is a fascinating work of non-fiction that deals with “Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America.” Macy, an award-winning journalist and author of Factory Man, explores the opioid crisis through the lives of four families whose teenage children’s addiction resulted in devastating emotional and economic costs. As she tells it, this is a story of rehab and prison, of recovery and relapse, of “the crushing and sometime contradictory facets of an inadequate criminal justice system often working at cross-purposes against medical science.” Macy argues that “the flood of painkillers pushed by rapacious pharma companies,” particularly Purdue Pharma, began in isolated and politically unimportant places. A resident of Roanoke, Virginia, she attempts to “retrace the epidemic as it shape-shifted across the spine of the Appalachians, roughly paralleling Interstate 81 as it fanned out from the coalfields and crept north up the Shenandoah Valley.” In addition to the collapse of work, she points to denial coupled with fear and ready stereotypes (“affliction of jobless hillbillies”) plus the lack of resources for local papers to cover the enfolding story as several reasons for why it took so long for this epidemic to be widely recognized. 

The abuse of opioids is a high interest topic for our students, both in Health classes and for Junior Theme and they will find much valuable information in Macy’s work, as well as other titles such as Sederer’s The Addiction Solution and Quinones’ Dreamland (to which Macy refers). DOPESICK is extensively researched, with more than twenty percent of the book devoted to notes. Chosen as an Amazon Best Book of August 2018, DOPESICK also received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.