Jess the Shelf-Declared Bibliophile's Reviews > Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

Have you read any of the other books like these? Like Land of Dreams, The Least of Us, Fentanyl, Inc., etc.
I’ve been wanting to but I’m just so angry. I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain in 2021 (maybe 2022? Whatever year it came out) and clearly the Sackler family is a bunch of sociopaths who don’t even bother to pretend they care about all the people their drugs have either killed at worst, or ruined their lives at best.

What worries me even more than OxyContin though, MUCH MORE THAN OXYCONTIN, is this new synthesized Fentanyl they’re selling off the street. I hated Oxy, and was physiologically (though never psychologically) addicted to it myself from 2005-2007. Doctors gave it out like candy then in central FL. But still, overdoses were pretty rare even though I knew quite a bit of people taking them. Usually they were the result of someone taking OxyContin with another drug (mainly another depressant like alcohol, or benzodiazepines like Xanax and Valium).

As potent as Fentanyl was back then, it was only available in transdermal patches and it was very dangerous because people could just chew one up (and that’s 72 hours worth of meds all at once). Or people smoked it, but that wasted a lot of the drug and the high only lasted 20 minutes (I myself never did that, but I did chew them on occasion… they weren’t easy to get at all, though). The biggest difference to me between OxyContin, Dilaudid, Lortab, the Fentanyl of the early and mid 2000s was that as potent as it was, users knew what was in it. Unlike the new stuff.

Now that OxyContin and the FDA-approved Fentanyl is so highly regulated, however, things have only gotten worse. The Sackler family paid off the courts with $6B, are still worth $5B, and even if they had been jailed, it wouldn’t bring back people’s loved ones.

Those people, who were involved in the class action lawsuit against them, either got nothing (the money was either given to the state to use for “drug prevention” programs) or at most, they may have gotten $5k each. Not that you can place a price on the death of someone you love and need, but $5 million would at least allow you to not worry about money, so long as you weren’t reckless about spending. If there’s anything I’ve gotten wrong, please feel free to correct me, lol.

But I don’t understand why we’re focusing on OxyContin, rather than the drugs which are killing people in this very moment. This new brand of Fentanyl is no longer FDA approved and is not being manufactured in “friendly countries”, such as Canada and Germany, but rather China, and cartels in Mexico.

Unlike the Fentanyl of the past, people - including just regular street dealers and traffickers, without so much as a high school diploma, let alone years of postdoctoral research - have learned how to synthesize it. That’s why it’s swamping the streets.

Street dealers are now able to synthesize it without using an opiate precursor (in other words, they don’t need the poppy plant to make it). Which results in hillbilly town hicks throwing together batches with god-only-knows what ingredients in them, causing each new batch a user buys (even if it’s from a dealer they know and trust) to vary in strength enormously. Users are now buying a drug that they know nothing about the ingredients or furthermore, the amount of each, which really boils it down to a game of Russian Roulette.

I lost my soulmate to it in April of this year. He’d had a bad addiction to OxyContin, the Fentanyl gel patches, etc., but still, never overdosed. And that was over the course of three years. He was doing great in life; had just finished his double master’s degree at UF in pharmacology and anatomy and physiology. He was about to start his PhD in the fall while I went to law school, and we planned to (finally) marry after a year (so August 2025). We had a trip for Prague planned in September.

Instead, some idiot dealer he met through chance while driving Uber (as a side gig) offered him that crap on NYE 2023/2024. He was fighting it so hard, too, because he had attained so much, and no one - outside of me - even knew he was struggling. He hadn’t used anything in 16 years. Yet the dealer wouldn’t stop showing up at his house with it, despite him practically begging him not to.

It’s no longer in the form of a transdermal patch, but rather a powder, which people inject intravenously. That’s why the epidemic and overdose rate has increased by about 10-12x since the 2000s when OxyContin was in its heyday. The life expectancy for men between 18-45 has decreased for the first time in history since WWI.

It’s absolutely terrifying, but I don’t see the government doing anything to stop it. Every time they get one drug off the street, something stronger replaces it. If the drugs they’re fixated on now didn’t kill someone in three years, but the ones they’re paying little attention to killed someone in three months, I just wish they’d prioritize the immediate danger over the past. It won’t do anything for me. But it could save millions of other people from suffering the same devastating loss.

This is why I have so much concern over whether these books are actually discussing the new brand of Fentanyl where there’s still the possibility to save lives.

Sorry that so long and for any repetition, but as you might imagine, it’s incredibly painful for me.

I happened to be there when he overdosed, too. We were supposed to be studying and motivating one another, and the stupid dealer called that night. He died the next morning. I woke up to the sound of him falling. Didn’t know where the Narcan was, didn’t know that it was only single-spray use per bottle, so I felt entirely helpless. I don’t blame myself because I did everything I could have (despite what a lot of other people seem to think) but you can’t force someone to stop anything. Especially if they’re financially independent and have a stable income and their life appears great to people on the outside. I’d never known anyone who was as good at hiding it as he was (then again, I told you what he was getting his PhD in…).

Megan wrote: "Sorry that so long and for any repetition, but as you might imagine, it’s incredibly painful for me.

I happened to be there when he overdosed, too. We were supposed to be studying and motivating ..."

Thank you for sharing your story and I'm so incredibly sorry for what you've been through, and for the loss of your ex. It's a sad thought but I believe the government and "the powers that be" don't WANT this problem addressed. For one thing, it's easy population control, and for another thing, the pharmaceutical industry and hospital industry have SUCH a massive multibillion (trillion??) dollar hold on the economy. If too much is said, then people could start to lose faith in that system. As far as this book, it was written 6 years ago, and as she was writing it, Fentanyl was just starting to rear its ugly face. She does describe the dangers quite a lot, but it just hadn't completely taken over yet. The problems with Oxycontin is that the release was directly right into the small mining towns where it latched its deadly claws. Also, while she was writing this book, the battle to make opioid pills non-crushable was in process, to hopefully deter less people from snorting or injecting, but like you said, that simply gives way to the home labs to do their own thing.

I'm guessing the show called "Dopesick" was based on this book. It was a sad thing to watch. Thanks for your eloquent review.