Dopesick ★★★★★

Dopesick (Click Here To Buy)

★★★★★

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy is a non-fiction book about the opiate crisis in America.

I read this as an audiobook checked out from the library.

Starting in 1996, Macy tracks the history and development of the pharmaceutical drug OxyContin by the company Purdue Pharma. From drug reps providing big perks and misinformation to doctors to the increase of overdoses and deaths, OxyContin overtook the country. But it all started in the small towns of Virginia. Macy spent time in these towns, talking with families who had lost loved ones, individuals put in jail for drug crimes, and those still fighting to get sober. Community members banded together against Purdue and tried to seek retribution for their families as well as stop OxyContin from being prescribed but there was no stopping it. When the company finally changed the formula of their pills so that people could no longer break it down to shoot or snort it, users moved on to heroin. This then had massive legal repercussions for individuals now being arrested for heroin. Macy clearly shows how one thing has led to another in the opiate crisis and now we have to figure out what to do about it.

Best line in the book: The answer is always community.

Macy is a fantastic journalist. This book reminded me of the MTV Documentary “Prescription for Change.” If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I have been wanting to read Dopesick for years and they recently made the book into a limited mini series on Hulu. I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks very well done. If you don’t know much about the opiate crisis, I would say this is #requiredreading

If you liked Dopesick, I also recommend Nomadland by Jessica Bruder, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, Bedlam by Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, and Evicted by Matthew Desmond.

Happy reading,

Ms.Bjork