Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

by Beth Macy

Because the most important thing for the morphine-hijacked brain is, always, not to experience the crushing physical and psychological pain of withdrawal: to avoid dopesickness at any cost.

The 1996 introduction of OxyContin coincided with the moment in medical history when doctors, hospitals, and accreditation boards were adopting the notion of pain as “the fifth vital sign,” developing new standards for pain assessment and treatment that gave pain equal status with blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature.

figure as high as 56 percent.

She had wanted the men to apologize, to admit that they had understood all along

that OxyContin wasn’t a novel way of fighting pain but simply a different and more potent way of dispensing nature’s oldest drug.

“If it had been an infectious disease, there would have been widespread panic.”

“It’s just nuts. Because if we really believe that addiction is a result of changes in the brain due to chronic heavy drug exposure, how can we believe that stimulant exposure isn’t going to change these kids’ brains in a way that makes them more vulnerable to harder drugs?” she added.

the folly of the decades-long War on Drugs, in which drug users are arrested four times more often than those who sell the drugs.