Her experience has led her to the conclusion the opioid crisis is “festering and growing, and taking advantage of long-standing fissures in American society, where we are seeing the person who is addicted as a moral failure and a criminal instead of seeing them as a person with a treatable medical condition. “That was largely because of opioids, liver disease from alcoholism and suicide, what economists call ‘deaths of despair,” according to Macy. In 2015, for the first time since being tracked, the life expectancy of Americans went down. “It was several years later that the whole nation came to know that we now had this heroin crisis.” ‘Festering and growing’ Readers were in disbelief, Macy said, that heroin had infiltrated the supposedly safe, secure suburban neighborhood. One died and the other was about to go to federal prison for selling him the heroin.” I did a three-part series about their story. “I first reported on it in 2012 when two wealthy kids from the fanciest suburb outside of Roanoke had their lives upended by heroin.

She recalls first reporting on the issue as a journalist for the Roanoke Times in Virginia, where she worked for 25 years. Opioid addiction has fueled Macy’s writing for over a decade. Thousands upon thousands of those prescribed oxycontin eventually became addicts, and when their drug of choice was unavailable, they turned to heroin. They were crushing it, snorting it, chewing it up.” But they knew from studies they’d done that people were abusing this drug. Macy calls the Sacklers “a family of millionaires who wanted to become billionaires, and they got the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) to approve a special insert that said their drug (oxycontin) was less prone to abuse than their competitors because it had a time release mechanism. In “Raising Lazarus,” Macy updates efforts to hold the family accountable and argues for new approaches to end the ongoing calamity of drug addition in the United States.

Beth dopesick