Towards the end of her new book, Beth Macy swaps journalism for advocacy. It’s a relief, in a sense. Few others are as well versed in America’s contemporary story of opioid dependency and the harm it has wrought.
Macy’s previous book, Dopesick, charted the rise of prescription painkillers through the 1990s and early 2000s. It became the touchstone account of a sprawling crisis of corporate malfeasance and regulatory mismanagement that largely eluded the criminal justice system despite killing about a million people.
