Dopesick Beth Macy

What this episode covers

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Beth Macy author of Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, And The Drug Company That Addicted America. published this month by Little, Brown and Company. Beth is a journalist who writes about outsiders and underdogs. Her writing has won more than a dozen national journalism awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard and the 2013 J. Anthony Lukas Word-in-Progress award for "Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local -- and Helped Save an American Town”. She is also the author of another fascinating book, Truvine. Dopesick is the story of one drug, oxycodone and how it has, and is, destroying a good part of America. And how one company managed to make this happen. Oxycodone is a powerful drug, administered for pain but abused by thousands, if not millions. It is also truly a gateway drug, leading to the abuse of other high-powered pharmaceuticals, heroin and now drugs like fentanyl. As it works its way along the I-81 corridor and now further and further out, it destroys lives, families, homes, marriages and takes lives indiscriminately. Greed, fed by unemployment and despair, combined to create a cocktail that takes down entire families, especially those who are already under stress from the loss of jobs, funds and hope. It is a juggernaut whose spread may not be yet controlled with the tools at hand. Beth chronicles the rise of this drug, its dissemination, the heroes that have tried to curtail its use and production and those who have fallen prey to its deadly lure.

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