Jennifer's Reviews > Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

"But you can't put a corporation in jail; you just take their money, and it's not really their money anyway. The corporation feels no pain."

Beth Macy has made a name for herself with her award-winning research and journalism, and she put her skills to good use in covering America's opioid crisis from past to present. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America discusses all the warnings history has left for us concerning the addictive qualities of opiates, referencing opium, laudanum and morphine in the nineteenth century leading up to modern-day prescription drugs such as Vicodin, Percocet and Lortab. But OxyContin was supposed to fix all that. Reportedly, it was designed to discourage abuse and addiction with its time-release quality. Allegedly, big pharma took their new wonder drug and pushed it like you've never seen. This is the part of the book where Macy excels. Where did the pharmaceutical companies market OxyContin? What did they do to encourage mass prescriptions for large quantities of their drug? How did they even get it approved with safety claims? I'd like to say you'll be surprised but if you're like me you probably won't be. I believe every word.

A well-rounded piece of nonfiction, Dopesick is filled with corporate greed, criminal prosecution, science: pharmacokinetics, challenges of recovery, the segue to heroine, the noteworthy timing of media coverage/public intervention, and in-depth interviews with and about the users who have ridden this nasty roller coaster.

Dopesick is a must read for anyone who has been impacted by the opioid crisis in some way, which is pretty much every tax payer in America. If you know someone who is recovering (or not) from opiates/opioids, this book may also help you understand why the process seems insurmountable. Now we need to see this kind of victim-sensitive coverage on cocaine/crack cocaine.

Quote:
“What happens is, it takes about eight years on average, after people start treatment, to get one year of sobriety...and four to five different episodes of treatment for that sobriety to stick. And many people simply don't have eight years.”

Note: If interested in learning what being "dope sick" entails, I found some information on this recovery website.