Pair with Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. Otherwise, I heartily recommend its discussion of the opioid epidemic.

Again, given the dark and difficult nature of this book, think long and hard before you choose it during quarantine days. She delves into real-life situations and doesn’t shy away from ugliness. It’s important not just to talk about addiction, but the difficulties faced by people trying to get clean. I think Macy covers the nuances of all the issues. I appreciate that Macy shows both the addict’s side, and that of the family member or caregiver. It’s not a linear process, and the possibility that addiction could rear its ugly head it always there. Like most people in the United States, several people in our extended family are in recovery from addictions. I also thought Macy did a strong narration of the audiobook.įor me, it hits home. If the topic interests you, this is definitely worth the time. My conclusionsĭopesick is every bit as good as the reviews say it is. She also spends significant time discussing medication assisted treatments (MAT) like suboxone and methadone, particularly as it relates to her subjects’ rehab and recovery experiences. But she does explain how the opioid pain killers came into existence, and how Purdue Pharma tried to make them harder to abuse. Her perspective is focused on the addicts, perhaps because there’s so much emotion in their stories. Journalists intend to be objective, but how do you do that here? That’s both positive and negative, I suppose.

She takes investigative journalism deep into people’s lives and doesn’t shy away from getting involved. Macy is first and foremost a storyteller. So maybe, it’s not a bad thing to revisit life and death with this perspective. In fact, people fighting or even just trying to survive an opioid addiction are in especially dire straits right now. But they need to be told, because the issues around our opioid epidemic don’t go away just because of a global virus pandemic. There are a lot of depressing stories in Dopesick. But one of my online book groups picked it for April, and so here I am. And, it’s probably not ideal quarantine reading.

It’s exceedingly complex to tease out the right and wrong here. To me, it’s about the way capitalism allows one group of people to harm another, all in pursuit of the almighty dollar and in the guise of treating a very real condition. Beth Macy tells hard truths in her 2018 book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America.

Dopesick beth