An instant New York Occasions bestseller, Dopesick is the just reserve to tell the full story from the opioid turmoil, from your boardroom to the courtroom and in to the living rooms of Americans struggling to save themselves and their families: ‘masterfully interlaces tales of communities in crisis with dark histories of commercial greed and regulatory indifference’ (NY Situations) from a journalist who has lived through it.

With this extraordinary work, Beth Macy takes us in to the epicenter of the national about Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America drama which has unfolded over 2 decades. From the labs and advertising departments of big pharma to regional doctor’s offices; rich suburbs to distressed small neighborhoods in Central Appalachia; from faraway towns to once-idyllic farm towns; the spread of opioid cravings follows a tortuous trajectory that illustrates how this turmoil provides persisted for such a long time and become so firmly entrenched. You start with a single seller who lands in a little Virginia town and pieces about turning senior high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy units out to answer a grieving mother’s question-why her just child died-and comes away with a gripping, unputdownable tale of greed and want. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy investigates the effective causes that led America’s doctors and sufferers to embrace a medical tradition where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. In some of the same communities featured in her bestselling book Manufacturer Man, the unemployed make use of painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their expenses, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, as well as high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death. Through unsparing, convincing, and unforgettably humane portraits of households and initial responders determined to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the problems comes into focus. In these politically fragmented situations, Beth Macy implies that one thing uniting Americans across geographic, partisan, and class lines is certainly opioid substance abuse. But actually amid twin crises in substance abuse and healthcare, Macy finds reason to hope and ample indications of the nature and tenacity that are helping the countless ordinary people ensnared by addiction create a better upcoming for themselves, their own families, and their communities. ‘An amazing feat of journalism, monumental in scope and urgent in its implications.’ – Jennifer Latson, The Boston Globe