DOPESICK

DOCTORS, DEALERS AND THE DRUG COMPANY THAT ADDICTED AMERICA

BETH MACY Head of Zeus, 376pp, £20, Oldie price £13.29 inc p&p

America has been in the throes of an opioid crisis for the past two decades, during which time an estimated 200,000 people have died, but it is only recently that the country has woken up to it fully. Beth Macy’s third book, Dopesick, is a gripping, heartbreaking and enraging tale of ruined lives and the corporate greed that led to a nationwide epidemic of painkiller addiction. The victims are not stereotypical ‘inner city’ heroin and crack addicts; they are often respectable people from small towns who become hooked on fiercely powerful opioids, the addictive qualities of which are underplayed by pharmaceutical companies and doctors provided with massive incentives to shift the drugs. Macy points the fingers at Purdue Pharma, which spent $4.04 billion in direct marketing in 2000. Now, four out of five of those who die from heroin abuse began with painkillers.

Reviewers were both impressed and moved by Macy’s investigations. ‘Shifting effortlessly between the sociopolitical and the personal, Macy weaves a complex tale that unfolds with all the pace of a thriller,’ wrote Sean O’hagan in the Guardian. Jessica Bruder, in the New York

Times, called the book a ‘masterwork of narrative journalism’. In the

Times, meanwhile, Melanie Reid struck a salutary note for British readers, noting that ‘the latest figures show the number of deaths in England and Wales due to the synthetic opioid fentanyl rose by 29 per cent in 2017’.