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Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Beth Macy, “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America” (Little, Brown & Company, 2018)
Description: “Appalachia was among the first places where the malaise of opioid pills hit the nation in the mid-1990s, ensnaring coal miners, loggers, furniture makers, and their kids.” This is how journalist Beth Macy premises her new book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (Little, Brown, & Company, 2018). She then sets out to share a history of how and why this happened.
Macy offers readers a familiar story of industrial exploitation and economic distress in central Appalachia, only, instead of focusing on the coal industry’s role in this history, Macy describes exploitation that resulte...