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

by Beth Macy

that would halt the breathing of twenty-six people in a single day, before

For the fifth year in a row, the state of West Virginia’s indigent burial-assistance program was about to exhaust its funds from interring opioid-overdose victims.

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. The rate of casualties is so unprecedented that it’s almost impossible to look at the total number dead—and at the doctors