Book Review: Dopesick

For the last week and a half, I have been reading Dopesick by Beth Macy. It’s a reporter’s deep dive into the opioid crisis in America. She looks at what set it off, the historical background, where it started, how it’s spreading, and its continued pervasiveness in and around all parts of the United States.

Not only does Macy talk to doctors, the executives of pharmaceutical companies, police offices, judges, doctors, nurses, religious leaders and more, she spends a significant portion of the book interviewing the addicted, drug dealers, and the families of the addicted.

I decided to read the book because when I signed up for the WKYC news alerts (local Ohio news station), it seemed like every day there was a story about an overdose. In fact today, as I am writing this, there was a man in Ohio who needed 10 shots of Narcan to revive him. 10. That’s insane.

I heard more and more stories about young people dying. People who I knew tangentially or through multiple degrees of separation. It is a sad statement that when it was mentioned that they were anywhere between the ages of 20 and 30, the cause of death was 9 times out of 10, an overdose.

I was getting increasingly frustrated and found myself falling into the, “Why can’t they just STOP?!” trap. I knew that it wasn’t that simple. I found my frustration magnified when I heard reports of methadone clinics being shut down for no reason and cities refusing the ignore the benefits of safe injection sites and needle exchange programs. I knew that if I wanted to be part of the solution, to be able to vote responsibly and have conversations with people about the problem intelligently, I needed to learn more.

I just wasn’t getting enough from the articles, news stories and special reports. Everything was slanted and seemed like it wasn’t giving a full picture of the problem. So, I decided to look for some books on the topic.

Dopesick seemed like a good place to start. Macy gives a concise, easy to understand yet somehow insanely detailed report on how the opioid crisis started. From the release of OxyContin and subsequent extreme overprescription to the lawsuits, reformulations, and eventual arrival of more heroin and synthetic opioids than any police force could manage.

One of the parts of her book that I found the most compelling was how broken the police force seemed to be. More than one officer she interviewed said, “We can’t arrest our way out of this problem. It’s too big.”

That stuck with me. It seems like people still think that the solution to America’s drug problem is to wage war on it. Arrest more people. Create harsher punishments. Throw the addicted into abstinence-only rehab programs. But that’s not working.

When current addicts and former addicts were asked about what they thought the solution was, they all generally had the same viewpoints. There isn’t enough real care. The addicted aren’t treated for addition the illness. Instead they are put through the justice system as criminals. This causes relapses and increasingly, it’s causing death.

The jist of the book is that America is failing at helping the addicted. There aren’t enough funds being put in the right places. People still think that arresting the addicted is the solution. No one wants safe injection sites in their neighborhoods even though people are injecting in their neighborhoods anyway.

We’ve had an opioid crisis in America for almost 40 years now. It’s killed more people in the last decade than HIV/AIDS killed in the entire time since it was discovered. There are statistics out there now saying that 10 Americans are dying from overdoses every single day.

How is it that our government just declared this a national emergency last year?

If you have been looking for insight and wanting answers. If you have been searching for some kind of understanding about why the opioid crisis is indeed a crisis, I highly recommend starting with Dopesick by Beth Macy.

Maybe if more of us take the time to actually learn about what is going on in our country, we can help stop it.