Dopesick [electronic resource] : Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

Title:

Author:

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-- New York Times -- New York Times Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother's question-why her only son died-and comes away with a gripping, unputdownable story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy investigates the powerful forces that led America's doctors and patients to embrace a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. In some of the same communities featured in her bestselling book -- The Boston Globe

Publisher:

Little, Brown and Company,

Date:

2018

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Reviews (6)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Macy (Truevine) takes a hard and heartbreaking look at the cradle of the opioid addiction crisis, the Appalachian region of Virginia and nearby states. She places the responsibility for the epidemic squarely on Purdue Frederick, makers of OxyContin, and its sales division, Purdue Pharma, which engaged in near-predatory marketing practices to sell a drug that has wreaked havoc on the lives of 2.6 million Americans who are currently addicted, with more than 100 dying per day from opioid overdoses. In the first of three sections, she addresses "big pharma" in telling detail, outlining how the overprescribing of pain medication in doctors' offices and emergency rooms created a market demand that was then met by illegal drug peddlers on the streets. Section two follows the spiral of addiction as users of prescription pills no longer able to afford their habit turn to heroin, a cheaper and more lethal solution to feed their fix. In the last section, the author changes the focus to what has become an addiction treatment industry. Macy potently mixes statistics and hard data with tragic stories of individual sufferers, as well as those who love and attempt to treat them. One addict, Tess Henry, was just 26 when she was first interviewed by Macy and, despite multiple attempts at rehab so that she could raise her infant son, she was dead within three years. Macy's forceful and comprehensive overview makes clear the scale and complexity of America's opioid crisis. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

Harrowing travels through the land of the hypermedicated, courtesy of hopelessness, poverty, and large pharmaceutical companies.A huge number of Americans, many of them poor rural whites, have died in the last couple of decades of what one Princeton researcher has called "diseases of despair," including alcoholism, suicide, and drug overdoses caused by the hopeless sense that there's a lack of anything better to do. Roanoke-based investigative journalist Macy (Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South, 2016, etc.) locates one key killerthe opioid epidemicin the heart of Appalachia and other out-of-the-way places dependent on outmoded industries, bypassed economically and culturally, and without any political power to speak of, "hollows and towns and fishing villages where the nearest rehab facility was likely to be hours from home." Prisons are much closer. Macy's purview centers on the I-81 corridor that runs along the Appalachians from eastern Tennessee north, where opioid abuse first rose to epidemic levels. She establishes a bleak pattern of high school football stars and good students who are caught in a spiral: They suffer some pain, receive prescriptions for powerful medications thanks to a pharmaceutical industry with powerful lobbying and sales arms ("If a doctor was already prescribing lots of Percocet and Vicodin, a rep was sent out to deliver a pitch about OxyContin's potency and longer-lasting action"), and often wind up dead or in jail, broke and broken by a system that is easy to game. Interestingly, Macy adds, "almost to a person, the addicted twentysomethings I met had taken attention-deficit medication as children." Following her survey of the devastation wrought in the coal and Rust belts, the author concludes with a call to arms for a "New Deal for the Drug Addicted," a constituency that it's all too easy to write off even as their number climbs. An urgent, eye-opening look at a problem that promises to grow much worse in the face of inaction and indifference. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Award-winning Virginia-based journalist Macy, author of best-sellers Factory Man (2014) and Truevine (2016), carefully constructs the through line from the midnineties introduction of the prescription painkiller OxyContin to the current U.S. opioid crisis: 300,000 deaths over the last 15 years, with that number predicted to double in the next 5. Its addictiveness initially far underreported, Oxy was outrageously marketed to doctors and overprescribed to patients, who quickly couldn't do without it. The much-later introduction of an abuse-resistant formula made heroin cheap and easily accessible, a natural next step. Macy's years of following the issue have earned her remarkable access to those suffering from opioid-addiction disorder as well as the people who tirelessly love and care for them and, in many cases, honor their memories. Again and again, she hears of the devotion the addicted claim to the drug, over every other aspect of their lives, and the motivating fear of dopesickness, gutting withdrawal symptoms. And despite its proven long-term success, medication-assisted treatment remains stigmatized and often too difficult to access. Although the realities are devastating, the doctors, the bereaved, and the advocates Macy introduces do offer hope. Hers is a crucial and many-faceted look at a still-unfolding national crisis, making this a timely and necessary read.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

THE TRIALS OF NINA MCCALL: Sex, Surveillance, and mcCalt the Decades-Long Government Plant to Imprison a "Promiscuous" Women, by Scott W. Stern. (Beacon, ? $28.95.) Stern's meticulous history - the first booklength account of an American government "social hygiene" campaign under which thousands of women were forcibly examined, quarantined and incarcerated - is a consistently surprising page-turner. THE BOUNCER, by David Gordon. (Mysterious Press, $26.) A goofy caper novel in the grand tradition of Donald E. Westlake, set among the international crime families of New York. DOPESICK: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, by Beth Macy. (Little, Brown, $28.) Macy's harrowing account of the opioid epidemic in which hundreds of thousands have already died masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference. AMITY AND PROSPERITY: One Family and the Fracturing of America, by Eliza Griswold. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) This impassioned account of fracking's toll on a small town in Pennsylvania by Griswold, a poet and journalist, lays bare in novelistic detail the human and environmental costs of a practice abetted by greed and government negligence. SPINNING SILVER, by Naomi Növik. (Del Rey, $28.) In her stunning new novel, rich in both ideas and people, Növik gives classic fairy tales - particularly "Rumpelstiltskin" - a fresh, wholly original twist, with the vastness of Tolkien and the empathy and joy in daily life of Le Guin. FLORIDA, by Lauren Groff. (Riverhead, $27.) In the 11 dramatic tales that make up her second story collection, Groff's version of Florida comes with menace, but no less wonder. The author is a careful, sharp recorder of the natural world, and this is restorative fiction for these urgent times. THE PRISON LETTERS OF NELSON MANDELA, edited by Sahm Venter. (Liveright, $35.) This volume of 255 letters, both heartbreaking and inspiring, by the former South African president and civil rights activist, shows his evolution over the course of his long prison sentence into a leader of rare moral courage. CLOCK DANCE, by Anne Tyler. (Knopf, $26.95.) In her latest Baltimore-centric novel, Tyler plunges a staid Arizona retiree into the off-kilter lives of a single mother, her daughter and their rambunctious neighbors. THE HIDDEN STAR, by K. Sello Duiker. (Cassava Republic, $17.95; ages 10 and up.) This captivating posthumous novel is set in a dusty town outside Soweto, South Africa, where magic and danger lurk as a girl discovers a wish-granting stone. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Choice Review

Dopesick delves deeply into the opioid overdose death crisis currently menacing the US. Presently, opioid deaths exceed the numbers of AIDS/HIV casualties, and the epidemic shows no signs of abatement. Macy, a journalist, began studying the opioid crisis over two decades ago--before it spun out of control. Her analysis is wide-ranging: she interviews public health officials, nurses, doctors, law enforcement personnel, addiction medical specialists, addicts, those in recovery, and their families. Providing a macro level understanding, she systematically explores how Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed OxyContin painkilling capsules without any firm scientific foundation, resulting in sharply rising numbers of addicted users while economic obsolescence began to affect rural America. Dopesick also offers a powerful micro-level analysis as Macy established enduring associations with those impacted by the crisis, following subjects through their repeated recovery efforts, interviewing some even in prison, and seeing some succeed in renouncing their addictions while others relapsed or experienced fatal overdoses. This heart-wrenching narrative calls attention to the US government's failure to adequately address this burgeoning crisis. An important read for anyone seeking to better understand the opioid death epidemic. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --William Feigelman, emeritus, Nassau Community College

Library Journal Review

Here is a comprehensive look at the opiate crisis from the formulation of heroin in 1898 to the impact of heroin and fentanyl addiction in Appalachia. Focusing on the crisis in three states-Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland-allows the author to explore the personal and family impacts of addiction in those areas, although the crisis is paralleled across the United States. The resulting tale includes the aggressive marketing of Oxycodone by Perdue Pharma; the over-prescription of pain meds by greedy physicians; the dealing and distribution of heroin laced with fentanyl to those injured on the job, athletes, and students; and overdose deaths, which are occurring at a record pace. This is a big story well told, clearly narrated by the author. The many characters and episodes are interwoven and blur somewhat in the audio format. Those serious about learning about the crisis will need a print copy with its copious source notes. VERDICT Recommended for adult nonfiction collections. ["Macy's use of current research by various experts makes clear how complex the opioid problem is, but the strength of this narrative comes from the people in the day-to-day battle": LJ 4/15/18 review of the Little, Brown hc.]-Cliff -Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.