After the past year, the opioid crisis has fallen away from headlines. Alas, it is still very real, killing over 80,000 people in 2020. Since 1999, over 800,000 Americans have died from drug overdoses, 70% of them related to opioids.
As Beth Macy details in Dopesick, poppy-derived opiates are nothing new. Morphine and heroin were used to treat wounded soldiers in the Civil War, and heroin was available for purchase in many drugstores at the turn of the Twentieth century. The term junkie was coined for addicts who salvaged scrap metal from junkyards to support their habits.
Opioid is a more recent term referring the synthetic variants of heroin. They notoriously reentered the American landscape in the late nineties, as pharma sales reps eagerly sold a new painkiller, OxyContin, to doctors. The Appalachian Bible Belt was particularly hard hit, as workers injured from blue collar jobs sought relief from a prescription pad. The sales reps were dead wrong in their estimation that OxyContin was harmless. Within weeks of using doctor-prescribed pills, many patients were hopelessly addicted, seeking heroin on the black market when their physicians cut them off.
Dopesick details the personal scourge of opioids. Activist doctors try to educate the public, grieving parents bury teenagers, and addicts turn to sex work to fund their habits. An economically depressed region creates a new job market for dealers driving to and from Baltimore and DC.
There isn’t much hope in the story. For every five people seeking rehab, there is one available bed. Many can’t pay the deductible after hospital stays. Entire families bear the brunt of addiction.
The people featured – doctors, activist nuns, mothers of dead children – are vividly drawn. There is one family where ten members are addicts. Many people end up in prison.
Dopesick is a reminder of a silent scourge that has been with us for a long time. Its message is not promising.
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