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

by Beth Macy

Over the years, Sue Ella’s and Sister Beth’s lives had been threatened because of their social activism, including once when Beth convinced an illiterate coal miner not to sign away all company liability for a mining accident. (“Greed makes people violent,” she told an interviewer in 1982. “When we stand with the least in the struggle for justice, there’s a price to pay.”) The Purdue offer was just another page in an old story. This is what happens when wealthy people think they own you, Sister Beth told her Lee County friends. Since the first piece of coal was chiseled from the first mountainside rock by a large out-of-state corporation, the region had suffered from a pattern of exploitation, she said, ticking off all the mining-company executives who’d flown in over the years and spread their money around trying to buy peace, and then shut down unions, reduced black-lung benefits, and kept other industries out to maintain low labor costs.