Raising Lazarus Quotes

“Death by drugs is now a national problem, but the crisis began as an epidemic of overprescribed painkillers in the distressed communities that were least likely to muster the resources to fight back. It erupted in rural fishing villages, coal communities, and mill towns—because Purdue’s sales strategy was to convince doctors that the nation’s injured miners and factory workers were better and more safely served by OxyContin than its weaker competitors. The company even maneuvered to convince the FDA to back this bogus claim.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“We are the heart of the heart of the heart of the crisis,” said Joe Solomon, a Charleston harm-reduction worker who leads the group Solutions Oriented Addiction Response (SOAR), and begged me to draw national attention to his group’s plight. “But when the world calls you hillbilly and hick and redneck, it’s so easy to internalize that stigma and say, ‘Who can I punch down to feel like I have worth? There’s people injecting drugs and stealing my kids’ bicycles—fuck ’em!”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“The most interesting people doing this work are the ones who can hold on to both ideas rather than just giving simple and pious-sounding statements…like ‘This is a health issue, not a crime.’ When at the same time you have addicted people who are committing crimes, including violent crimes, you have to [deliver justice] for the woman whose [drug-using] boyfriend just broke her nose.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“harm-reduction ministry.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Shadowing Tim Nolan, the sixty-two-year-old nurse-practitioner, reminded me of a quote I’d first heard from an addiction doctor in Massachusetts. He said the solution to the epidemic could be summed up in a single quote from a Harvard physician in 1926: “The secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“When you peer into the country’s most intractable problems—homelessness, disability, domestic violence, child neglect—you see the persistence of dopesickness everywhere.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“A trickle of settled lawsuits won’t “satisfy the populace because what people really thought they wanted was blood,” said Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder. “What we really need is a whole new public health infrastructure.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Asked afterwards if she felt her work was stopping the spread of hepatitis C, Lowe let me know that I had asked the wrong question: “I know I’m doing that,” she said. “What’s important is that he knows somebody cares; nobody’s judging him. And it wasn’t just a transaction; I asked him how his day was. I treated him like a human being.” The idea that drug users are worthy human beings—that they are, in fact, equals—is harm reduction in a nutshell. That attitude wasn’t something I’d witnessed much before in the largely Southern, rural locales where I’d previously covered the opioid crisis,”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Taped-up boxes signified the dry goods to which they had added clean needles, condoms, wound-care kits, and socks. “Ten syringes fit nicely in a box of Nature’s Valley granola when you take out a few bars,” she said.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Mathis has a flower tattoo on her forearm with the words Acta Non Verba, which is Latin, she told me, for “Do shit. Don’t just talk about it.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“In a country that spends five times more to incarcerate people with SUD than it does to treat their medical condition, progress was stagnant. In 2019, an estimated 18.9 million Americans in need of treatment didn’t receive it. That’s a treatment gap of roughly 90 percent.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Stigma fuels the harmful misperception of addiction as solely being a matter of personal choice, rather than an affliction or a disease.
In 'Raising Lazarus,' I write about drug users, patients, and people who use drugs. That's the preferred, person-first language, rather than addicts or substance abusers.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Best not to give up too quickly on a neighbor. Best not to judge a stone to heavy to roll. Only by endeavoring to help in the face of so much suffering can we bear witness to the miracle of raising Lazarus.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“It is cruel and scientifically backward to make treatment contingent on stopping drug use. The real magic wand is to give up on the rigid notion that a single fix exists. Call that harm reduction, if you will, or call it caring for the patient.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Our institutions, if they choose to, can learn a lot from the grounded, service-oriented kind of harm reduction embodied in the work being done right now by the people in this book and by so many like them. But, their work is simply not sustainable. Individuals, no matter how inspiring or selfless cannot solve a systemic problem without sustained institutional, governmental support that replicates their heroic innovations.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“The United States of America will not reverse its declining life expectancy until we replace our current system of corporate socialism with one that puts the health and happiness of regular people ahead of billionaires. Healthcare and housing should be basic human rights, full stop. Medicaid expansion is the lowest of low-hanging fruit and should be enacted in every state with the goal of eventually adopting Medicare for all.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“I want to believe that we can all agree that no human being deserves to die abandoned and alone. I want to believe that but in a world where people use drugs rather than go to a hospital where they've already been treated poorly, choose to die alone at home or next to a riverbank, I'm not so sure. America remains the only country on the planet where it's easier to get high than it is to get help.
When crises pile on top of each other, humans tend to dissociate. It's hard to think about the climate crisis when you're worried about paying your electric bill. The more emotionally depleted we are, the more we revert to our lizard brains and the more inured we become to the suffering of others. 'I got traps that will hurt you and I will hunt you down.' Lizard brain warps our sense of self, it undercuts our health, and it literally turns us into victims of our own toxic individualism. 'Americans are drowning in the lack of grace, the lack of humility, the complete inability to assume well about others', my friend, the trauma expert, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, said.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“But too many stone rollers still divide themselves between tough love, 12-step models, and the harm reduction model of meeting people where they are with medicine, compassion, and tiny packs of triple antibiotic ointment. Too many still universalize their own personal experience instead of embracing the pluralistic approach that one size never fits all when it comes to addiction. This moment is an historic opportunity to radically rethink addiction care, to do more than give lip service to the throwaway line 'addiction is a disease,' and to treat it like one.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Part of the divide is amongst ourselves, and it has to do both with class and race, as in, ‘This county used to be so great, but then these urban problems came in.’” They wrongly blame immigrants for taking their jobs when it was greedy corporate executives beholden to greedy shareholders who offshored the jobs, keeping more profits for themselves and treating the working class like a coal seam in Appalachia—a resource to be mined, no matter the human or environmental cost.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“The neighbors in Mount Airy were not so different from working-class people across America. Politically disconnected and angry at those they perceived to be bilking the government, they were turning on each other rather than placing the blame on the exploitative pharmaceutical companies that seeded the epidemic and the power-hungry politicians who rolled out the red carpet for them while doing virtually nothing about growing inequality, poor health care coverage, and declining wages that affected everyone, whether they used drugs or not.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“(Needle exchanges are now referred to as syringe service programs, or SSPs, because they offer more than just syringes—and the phrase is more palatable politically.)”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“always tell people, just don’t disappear on me.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“we fix the opioid crisis, we fix America,” one reader e-mailed me, envisioning a country where meaningful work, health care, and social supports become not only embedded into treatment protocols; they might one day serve as prevention strategies, too.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis