Users, faced with the wrenching pain of withdrawal and the attendant vomiting and diarrhea, turned to heroin, a substance that was cheaper and easier to get. Crackdowns on pill mills also made opioid painkillers harder to procure.
After a $600 million settlement in 2007, Purdue reformulated Ox圜ontin so that the pills turned into a gooey, unsnortable mess when crushed. Macy started reporting her story in 2012, when what had begun as a problem with pain pills had mutated into a full-blown heroin epidemic. Macy’s strengths as a reporter are on full display when she talks to people, gaining the trust of chastened users, grieving families, exhausted medical workers and even a convicted heroin dealer, whose scheduled two-hour interview with the author ended up stretching to more than six hours. “ Dopesick” touches on these political developments, but its emphasis lies elsewhere. Commentators on the left have pointed out the gaping discrepancy between the sympathy extended to today’s opioid users, who are mainly white, and the brutal, racist handling of the war on crack. With “ Dopesick,” her third book after “Factory Man” and “Truevine,” Macy has waded into a public health morass that has also become a political minefield. An expert, someone supposed to know better, had betrayed her trust.īooks like “Pain Killer,” by Barry Meier, a reporter for The New York Times, and “Dreamland,” by the journalist Sam Quinones, have covered the opioid crisis in detail, but they appeared before the 2016 election, when the places in the country most affected by the epidemic went for Trump. She was aware of her own choice in the matter, but her physician instructed her to double up on highly addictive narcotics. If you want a glimpse into how the opioid crisis began, the woman’s words are a good place to start. But her doctor, she assumed, was a “high-standard person, someone you’re supposed to trust and believe in.” “The doctor didn’t force me to take them,” she said of Ox圜ontin and Percocet, two powerful painkillers she was instructed to take concurrently. Fewer than 50 pages into Beth Macy’s “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America,” one of the many opioid users she talks to - this one a mother in Virginia - explains how her addiction started in the early 2000s, after routine gallbladder surgery.
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