Chris McGreal

A hard-hitting look at the opioid epidemic that big pharmaceutical companies, primarily Purdue Pharma, pushed on the country starting in the 1990s in Appalachia. When patients got addicted to OxyContin, many moved on to street heroin and now, lately, fentanyl, which is an artificial, highly concentrated opiate that is killing a lot of people.

This is an American tragedy, as Americans consume 80% of the world's opioids. I saw a documentary about this but the book is more complete.

Highly recommended!… (more)

"No one really knows how many have died from a drug overdose either caused by opioids or in combination with other drugs: the official count is 350,000 between 1999 and 2016."

350,000! 350,000! 350,000!

From the first page this book is a riveting account of the rise of the use and abuse of opioids from the pharmaceutical companies who mined the poorer segments of our country like West Virginia to the dubious fraudsters who built businesses shoveling prescriptions by the thousands. It is the story of the people who lost loved ones to overdoses and then the eventual comeback of heroin and fentanyl. This is a story of greed, corruption, intended and unintended consequences. Our families and communities have been laid waste.… (more)

If Americans had better health benefits such as paid sick leave, maybe they wouldn't need as many painkillers and opioids. Which might also be why the opioids epidemic is unique to the US.
McGreal's book is a perfect case study in the importance of C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination. Look for the intersection of social structure, history, power, and social location. This is what the book does. Because the epidemic is not a question of people with failing morals, defective hillbilly culture and other such nonsense. The book demonstrates that the structure of development, regulation, approval, distribution, prescription, and delivery of opioids is truly what was at the root of this, along with the powerful entities backing the spread of opioids for everything, pain as the 5th vital sign, and the data-less idea of an epidemic of pain. There is the power of Big Pharma, its sales reps and lobbyists, and their influence in Congress and government agencies, along with that of the medical profession. All of this goes beyond the unsavory characters the book also describes. And the selection of depressed areas such as poor counties in West Virginia, as the "_target" for mass dumping of Oxycontin.
As I often tell my students, nothing ever happens by chance in society. An epidemic of addiction to opioids does not just happen. The book shows how it was constructed back in the 1990s, and has morphed over several decades with no clear end in sight.… (more)