The New York Times Book Review - Jessica Bruder
…a harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency. [Dopesick]…is a masterwork of narrative journalism, interlacing stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference…In a poignant early scene…a mother at the grave of her 19-year-old son…wants to know "how Jesse went from being a high school football hunk and burly construction worker to a heroin-overdose statistic, slumped on someone else's bathroom floor." That question—and its larger implications—becomes an engine for the entire investigation, driving it forward with plain-spoken moral force…Taken as a whole…this gripping book is a feat of reporting, research and synthesis.
The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
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…Macy captures an Appalachian landscape in a state of emergency and in the grip of disillusionment…
Publishers Weekly
★ 06/11/2018
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.)
From the Publisher
"With the greatest compassion, Beth Macy plunges us into a world that deserves our knowing, filled with grieving mothers, cut-throat pharmaceutical executives, determined first-responders, and indifferent lawmakers. Radiating out from Appalachia, where the collision of poverty and pain created the ghoulish market for OxyContin, to the quiet addiction of suburbs and farming communities, you will recognize this world and weep for it. And then you will want to change it, because there can be no other response. Dopesick is both a tribute to those who lost and a fierce rebuke to those who took, and the new guidebook for understanding this quintessentially American crisis."—Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia
"Dopesick will make you shudder with rage and weep with sympathy. Beth Macy's empathy and fearless reporting reaches beyond the headlines to tell the stories of how real people have been left to cope with the fallout of corporate greed, and the willful blindnesses of businesses and the government. Macy again shows why she's one of America's best non-fiction writers"—Brian Alexander, author of Glass House
"All prior books on this topic, including my own, were written as if describing the trunk, the ear, or the tail, without quite capturing the whole elephant. Journalist Beth Macy has packed the entire elephant and then some into one book. Her writing jumps from the page with a fast-paced narrative, colorful and inspiring characters, vivid historical detail, and a profound sense of place."—Anna Lembke, author of Drug Dealer, M.D., psychiatrist and professor of addiction medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine
Library Journal - Audio
11/01/2018
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 overprescription 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
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-05-10
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 killer—the opioid epidemic—in 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.
