In the new paperback edition's discussion guide, she argues again for greater emphasis on medical treatment for addicts.And she discussed President Trump, lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and other issues in an interview with The Daily Yonder, which covers rural America. Born healthy, her son was taken from her, and Tess’s struggles to stay off drugs and become a fit mother provide a moving counterpoint to Macy’s discussion of the controversies that roil our national debate over addiction treatment.Journalist Beth Macy has chronicled the origins of the opioid crisis in Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America. Another of her subjects, high school athlete and honor student Tess Henry, became addicted to pills and then heroin, was jailed for dealing, and took heroin or Suboxone (a synthetic opioid used to treat addiction) throughout a pregnancy. Most compelling are the characters she was able to follow over time, like Mumpower, who recovered from addiction in prison and a halfway house, trained himself in mixed martial arts, and was clean at the time of the book’s publication. Although Macy’s stories are set in Virginia, they could happen anywhere in the United States.

This exhaustively reported book includes many heartbreaking examples of young lives lost to drugs, sometimes so suddenly that parents had been unaware of the problem, sometimes after repeated efforts to help a child get clean in rehabilitation facilities or treatment programs. Van Zee’s efforts were chronicled in “Pain Killer,” a 2003 book by New York Times reporter Barry Meier, one of the first journalists to aggressively cover the Ox圜ontin story. Among them was Art Van Zee, a dedicated Virginia country doctor who launched a petition drive in 2001 asking the FDA to remove Ox圜ontin from the market. A few alert doctors, pharmacists, clinic workers and local health officials tried to sound an alarm. In the late 1990s, soon after Purdue Pharma began an aggressive national marketing campaign for its new, long-acting painkiller, Ox圜ontin, patients hooked on that drug began showing up in clinics and emergency rooms in rural America - in farming and coal-mining counties, in economically depressed Midwestern factory towns, in logging and fishing communities in Maine.

A Roanoke-based reporter, Macy had a front-row seat for the pain pill epidemic’s march through rural and small-town western Virginia, moving south to north on a path roughly parallel to U.S.

Dopesick beth