Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
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42%
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maintenance treatment is superior to abstinence-based rehab for opioid-use disorder.
47%
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“We’ll score a huge drug bust that we’ve been working on for maybe a year, and all that does is create a vacuum in the market that lasts maybe five to seven days,”
51%
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new mothers, an NAS nurse told me. “These moms are so over the top after they deliver because they’re trying to show everybody how much they care,”
53%
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The FBN framed methadone as “unsafe”—read: and maybe even pleasurable—after studies revealed that morphine addicts liked it.
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Such controversies continue to this day and illustrate the blurry line between lethal and therapeutic, between the control of pain and suffering and the pleasure of a cozy high.
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Vivitrol, an opiate blocker and anticraving drug given as a shot that lasts around a month, has no abuse potential or street value, and would therefore later become the favored MAT of law enforcement.
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When complicated lives need repair, and even the best-intentioned doctors are rushed, it was as clear then as it is now: Medication can only do so much.
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it was the morphine-hijacked brain, the scrambled neurotransmitters that kept people from thinking clearly or regulating their pain with nonnarcotic substances, or imagining the possibility of feeling happy again.
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when it came to his own son he was helpless, even denying that the constellation of scars on his son’s arms were track marks.
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Users can’t get sober if they’re dead, and it’s cheaper and more humane to give them clean syringes, say, than it is to pay for HIV and/or hepatitis C treatment.
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The initiative is credited with reducing needle-injected HIV instances from 64 to 8 percent.
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“They can’t take in any other information because it throws a different light on their own personal recovery.”
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it takes the typical opioid-addicted user eight years—and four to five treatment attempts—to achieve remission for just a single year. And yet only about 10 percent of the addicted population manages to get access to care and treatment for a disease that has roughly the same incidence rate as diabetes.
60%
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and once had a three-year string of near-daily Goodwill shopping fueled by a personal style rule that every accessory or piece of clothing had to match the color she’d chosen that day—if her outfit was green, then her earrings, shoes, and tights had to all match, down to her rings.
60%
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I don’t think she was fighting withdrawal symptoms as much as she was fighting her mental illness demons,” including bipolar depression and probably PTSD,
62%
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Why had blacks failed to become ensnared in opioid addiction?
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Doctors didn’t trust people of color not to abuse opioids, so they prescribed them painkillers at far lower rates than they did whites. “It’s a case where racial stereotyping actually seems to be having a protective effect,”
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Portugal, which decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin, in 2001, adding housing, food, and job assistance—and now has the lowest drug-use rate in the European Union, along with significantly lowered rates of drug-related HIV and overdose deaths.
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Ronnie realized that he could stock shelves for two weeks and not come close to making what he could dealing drugs in a single day.
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everyone involved views the problem too rigidly—through the lens of how they get paid,
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“I don’t have the leverage to get smart or act crazy when I get pulled over,” he said. “My goal every day is to make it back to my wife in one piece so I can live to fight another day, so I’m just ‘yes, sir, no, sir,’ and all that.”
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because when someone dies, customers flock to his or her dealer,
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meeting people’s basic needs will dampen their enthusiasm for drugs.”
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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.”
Kate Davis
Pharmaceutical litera
69%
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96 percent of the adopted kids weren’t orphaned—they’d been removed from their drug-addicted parents by social service workers.
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He’d been speedballing painkillers with meth, which makes users paranoid and gives them “ridiculous strength.”
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Everywhere in America, it was painstaking to walk skeptics through the social, criminal, and medical benefits of helping the least of their brethren, but worth it—even if you had to get your ass kicked.
71%
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Judge Michael Moore’s hair had turned from salt-and-pepper to white in the year since I’d first interviewed him.
Kate Davis
Nice detail
73%
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“Whatever rules you make, you better stick to them. Your son or daughter depends on it. They will call your bluff on everything. Don’t you budge. Changing the rules only confuses a young, developing mind.”
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