Dopesick- Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America

**From the New York Times bestselling author of Factory Man and Truevine, a work of deep reporting that reveals, as never before, the tragedy of America's opioid crisis, exposing those responsible for its creation and the wholly impotent response to it.****

**In this masterful work, Beth Macy takes us into an epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. Dopesick is the first book to chart the tragic spread of prescription and street drugs from distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs, disparate cities, and once-idyllic farm towns, a trajectory that explains how the crisis persisted for so long and became so entrenched.

Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town to work at a chicken-processing plant and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin-overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother's question -why her only son died - and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. In some of the same distressed communities featured in her bestselling book Factory Man, the unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills while under-challenged teens across America trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high-school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death.

Through unsparing, yet deeply human portraits of the families and first responders struggling to ameliorate the epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows, perhaps the only thing that unites Americans across geographic and class lines is opioid drug abuse. In a country already unable to provide basic healthcare for all, Dopesick exposes the pioneering spirit necessary for those facing addiction to build better futures for themselves and others.