Macy spent six years following families affected by the opioid epidemic in and around her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, and she begins by noting that several interviewees died before she had time to transribe her interview notes. Macy addresses a wealth of complex issues in her engaging, spitfire prose, such as the difficulties of rehab and disagreements about the benefits of step programs versus medication-assisted treatment.
Macy is a masterful storyteller, and Dopesick is full of unforgettable stories, including those of policemen, caregivers, prosecutors and a dope dealer named Ronnie Jones. Macy traces the origins of the crisis, which was perpetuated by Purdue Pharma, a company owned by one of the richest families in America.
Dopesick is dedicated to the memory of 10 opioid victims. Their stories and those of their surviving families form the heart of this book. There are no easy fixes, of course. This article was originally published in the August issue of BookPage and edited online for clarity. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook. August The damage done. Beth Macy. Review by Alice Cary. Share this Article:.
Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Hers is a crucial and many-faceted look at a still-unfolding national crisis, making this a timely and necessary read. If you haven't read it, I would highly recommend you read Dopesick. A harrowing, infuriating, eye-opening book. These painful and personal stories form the heart of Macy's book and make it perhaps the most empathic of the volumes regarding the epidemic But to describe Dopesick simply as a series of human interest stories shortchanges its comprehensiveness.
Levin, M. It's a book about kids and moms and neighbors and the people who try to save them. It's about shame and stigma and desperation.
It's about bad policy, greed and corruption. It's a Greek tragedy with a chorus of teenage ghosts who know how to text but can't express how they feel. With compassion and humanity, Macy takes us into the lives of the victims, their families, law enforcement, and even some of the criminals.
A great book! People I know Your heart will break like mine has. Honest, rational, and respectful discussion of opioid addiction is an essential starting point for any successful effort to push back against it.
The victims of such corporate largesse and self-aggrandisement were the patients. Macy recounts how one woman became addicted after she was prescribed OxyContin and Percocet together to relieve the pain that followed gallbladder surgery.
Shifting effortlessly between the sociopolitical and the personal, Macy weaves a complex tale that unfolds with all the pace of a thriller, her deep journalism — interviews with dealers, police officers, activists, local politicians as well as users and their families — matched by a sense of barely suppressed anger at what is happening to communities like Roanoke, Virginia, where she has lived since In , Roanoke received its first wake-up call when the news broke that two beloved local TV weathermen had been discovered to be heroin users after emergency services responded to an overdose call and found one of them unconscious in the bathroom of his stylish apartment.
She also contrasts the often sympathetic media portrayal of mainly white opioid addicts with the demonising of mainly black crack addicts. The link between prescribed opioid addiction and heroin use is implicit throughout the book, one following on from the other in communities where hard drug use had until recently been relatively rare.
Not family. Not sex. Not shelter. The only relationship that matters is between you and the drug. Inevitably Dopesick is a book punctuated by tales of the dead and the damaged, many of them recounted by parents who have become anti-big pharma activists.
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