Trial Magazine

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America
Beth Macy
Little, Brown and Company
littlebrown.com
384 pp., $28

After speaking with a grieving mother in Shenandoah County, Va., who wanted to know “what exactly” led to her 19-year-old son’s death from a drug overdose, journalist and author Beth Macy set out to find the answer. Her in-depth interviews with people deeply affected by the U.S. opioid epidemic frame a discussion of the economic and sociopolitical factors that enabled it. Key to this narrative is Macy’s review of the drug manufacturers and distributors that flooded the market with prescription opioids such as OxyContin, disregarding warnings that their aggressive “marketing practices had crossed a legal line.” Although telling a story “closer to tears than laughter,” Macy highlights the voices of those fighting this public health crisis.