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

by Beth Macy

Drug overdose had already taken the lives of 300,000 Americans over the past fifteen years, and experts now predicted that 300,000 more would die in only the next five. It is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of fifty, killing more people than guns or car accidents, at a rate higher than the HIV epidemic at its peak.

In the 1820s, one of Boston’s leading merchants masterminded an opium-smuggling operation off the Cantonese coast, spawning millions for Boston Brahmins with the names of Cabot, Delano (as in FDR), and Forbes. This money would go on to build many of the nation’s first railroads, mines, and factories.

Bill Clinton had predicted that China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization would eventually create a “win-win” for workers. American companies would theoretically be able to export products to China’s growing consumer class, an argument Wall Street championed when stock prices climbed with every new plant-closing announcement. Corporate shareholders and CEOs ate up Clinton’s prediction, a cheery best-case version of Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century “invisible hand.” As the economists described it, Chinese peasants would better their lot by making chairs in factories, while dislocated American workers would retrain for more fulfilling, advanced jobs.

On my way to the prison, I’d been listening to the audiobook of Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow, I told him, the seminal book on mass incarceration that likens the War on Drugs to a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow. “I’ve read The New Jim Crow twice,” Ronnie said. He’d also read lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s majestic Just Mercy, a memoir about his work against the racial bias and economic inequities inherent in the criminal justice system, which included efforts on behalf of falsely accused death row inmates. “It had me crying when I read it,” he said. These books we had both read challenged the tough-on-crime government narrative of the past forty years, one that fostered the shift in public spending from health and welfare programs to a massive system of incarceration, with a fivefold increase in imprisonment and corrections spending that soared from $6.9 billion in 1980 to $80 billion today.