“Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America”

Fewer than 50 pages into Beth Macy’s “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America,” one of the many opioid users she talks to — this one a mother in Virginia — explains how her addiction started in the early 2000s, after routine gallbladder surgery. “The doctor didn’t force me to take them,” she said of OxyContin and Percocet, two powerful painkillers she was instructed to take concurrently. But her doctor, she assumed, was a “high-standard person, someone you’re supposed to trust and believe in.”

If you want a glimpse into how the opioid crisis began, the woman’s words are a good place to start. She was aware of her own choice in the matter, but her physician instructed her to double up on highly addictive narcotics. An expert, someone supposed to know better, had betrayed her trust.

Books like “Pain Killer,” by Barry Meier, a reporter for The New York Times, and “Dreamland,” by the journalist Sam Quinones, have covered the opioid crisis in detail, but they appeared before the 2016 election, when the places in the country most affected by the epidemic went for Drumpf. With “Dopesick,” her third book after “Factory Man” and “Truevine,”Macy has waded into a public health morass that has also become a political minefield. Commentators on the left have pointed out the gaping discrepancy between the sympathy extended to today’s opioid users, who are mainly white, and the brutal, racist handling of the war on crack.

“Dopesick” touches on these political developments, but its emphasis lies elsewhere. Macy’s strengths as a reporter are on full display when she talks to people, gaining the trust of chastened users, grieving families, exhausted medical workers and even a convicted heroin dealer, whose scheduled two-hour interview with the author ended up stretching to more than six hours. (continues)