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

by Beth Macy

“At the end of your journey, you’re not going after drugs to get high; you’re going to keep from being sick.”

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.”)

“As long as it was in the lower economic classes and marginalized groups, like musicians and people of ethnic minorities, it was OK because it was with those people,”

“We can’t arrest our way out of this epidemic.”

“When work no longer becomes an option for people, what you have at the base is a structural problem, where the American dream becomes a scam.”

“If only [politicians] understood that getting access to Medicaid would actually save money and lives!”

Today, courts largely continue to send the addicted to prisons when reliable treatment is difficult to secure, and many drug courts controlled by elected prosecutors still refuse to allow MAT, even though every significant scientific study supports its use.

If my own child were turning tricks on the streets, enslaved not only by the drug but also criminal dealers and pimps, I would want her to have the benefit of maintenance drugs, even if she sometimes misused them or otherwise figured out how to glean a subtle high from the experience. If my child’s fear of dopesickness was so outsized that she refused even MAT, I would want her to have access to clean needles that prevented her from getting HIV and/or hepatitis C and potentially spreading them to others.

“Perhaps the day will come when more sensible views prevail—that relapse is the norm; that drug addiction should be treated as a chronic, relapsing problem that affects the public health; and that meeting people’s basic needs will dampen their enthusiasm for drugs.”

“So, as a society, we’re going to have to learn to live with possibly dangerous or at least risky new drugs—because Big Pharma’s going to keep churning them out.”

while most Americans support federal financing of health care and even a slim majority approves of single-payer, those reforms will likely remain political nonstarters until more voters begin defining themselves in contrast to the billionaire class holding sway in Washington.

“The more we talk about the epidemic as an individual disease phenomenon or a moral failing, the easier it is to obfuscate and ignore the social and economic conditions that predispose certain individuals to addiction,”

“The moment [heroin] crossed those boundary lines from the inner city into the suburbs, it became an ‘epidemic.’ But nobody paid any attention to it until their cars were getting robbed, and their kids were stealing their credit cards.”

“What each of us can do is expand our circle of compassion and empathy, and urge others—including our elected officials—to do the same.”