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

by Beth Macy

Those of us living highly curated and time-strapped lives in cities across America—predominantly mixing virtually and physically with people whose views echoed our own—had no idea how politically and economically splintered our nation had become. And also how much poorer and sicker and work-starved the already struggling parts of the nation truly were—because we didn’t follow that story.

“It was like shooting Jesus up in your arm,” Brian said of his first IV injection. “It’s like this white explosion of light in your head. You’re floating on a cloud. You don’t yet know that the first time is the best. After that, you’re just chasing that first high.”

“The cellphone is the glue that holds it all together for the modern drug user,” Brian told me. “In high school, I snuck out of the house a number of times to meet people at the bottom of the driveway, and my parents had no clue. Aside from taking my cellphone away, my parents also could have looked at my text message logs and gotten a sense of what was going on.”