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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
This book was captivating and incredibly enlightening to a current public health issue. Journalism at its finest with this book.
Very interesting topic but seemed repetitive at times. The story bounced around quite a bit. I had a hard time staying interested and that made it a slow read for me.
informative
sad
medium-paced
Brilliantly reported. Devastatingly honest. Unique in its providing of an answer to the problem it describes. Stellar.
An exceptional book, one that gave me a lot of food for thought. The dignity of dying, the right we as people have to be free of pain, the science of addiction, there were many ideas in this book that I loved reading and thinking about. The disorganized structure, I can see how it’s not for everyone, but I liked it, it felt like it mirrored the decentralization of opioids and heroin circling one another. Like most NF books, it could be about 100 pages shorter due to him repeating so much information and so many anecdotes. It got a little preachy in the afterward. I wish he’d talked more about 2008 and the epidemic, along with touching the coasts more. Overall, excellent and highly recommended read.
I finished this audiobook in two days. I was captivated from start to finish, it read like a thriller despite being non-fiction. It describes the emergence of a new drug distribution system for "black tar" heroin and how this insidiously intertwines with the emerging opioid pain killer crisis. Enterprising Mexicans and greedy pharmaceutical companies form an unholy alliance that has resulted in millions of ruined lives and countless dead. It shows the very worst of rampant capitalism. It's one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read, highly recommended!
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
dark
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
What have we done. This book details how the opiate epidemic took root. A science less paragraph known as Porter and Jick would be quoted over and over, encouraging the inappropriate use of opiates, specifically and eventually OxyContin. This combined with an infinite supply of "drivers" for heroin, the need to escape poverty, the vulnerability of addicts and most importantly the greed of Purdue pharma has led to opiate drug overdoses now outpacing automobile deaths. Sickening. But after reading this book the ease of how this has happened makes more sense. Very well written.
Read for book club: rating up. This book was extremely well researched, with tons and tons of information. The author did an amazing job putting it all together so that it wasn't completely analytical but had a storytelling feel. Overall I thought it could have been condensed. There is a young readers version out there that may have been just the right amount of info and length.