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A review by meekoh
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy
4.0
This book does an excellent job of conveying the human toll of the opioid crisis. It humanizes the crisis by including multiple first-hand accounts of user experiences and the impact on families.
However, I wish the book had better outlined the socio-economic factors that allow addiction to thrive. What makes a community more vulnerable to an addiction epidemic? How does it correlate with unemployment rates, family structure, or education? What healthcare approaches have had proven success? What laws hinder recovery? While the author does discuss some of these issues, I feel that a more academic structure was needed to clearly show causalities, systematic failings, and outline conclusions.
This book gives the impression that addiction is inevitable once an opioid prescription is written. Multiple studies have proven that this is simply not the case. It is also a fact that opioids give patients suffering from chronic pain the opportunity to live a normal life. It is important regulations evolve in ways that do not punish this demographic. While overprescribing is undoubtedly an issue, there are equally important underlying causes of addiction that would benefit from thorough analysis.
However, I wish the book had better outlined the socio-economic factors that allow addiction to thrive. What makes a community more vulnerable to an addiction epidemic? How does it correlate with unemployment rates, family structure, or education? What healthcare approaches have had proven success? What laws hinder recovery? While the author does discuss some of these issues, I feel that a more academic structure was needed to clearly show causalities, systematic failings, and outline conclusions.
This book gives the impression that addiction is inevitable once an opioid prescription is written. Multiple studies have proven that this is simply not the case. It is also a fact that opioids give patients suffering from chronic pain the opportunity to live a normal life. It is important regulations evolve in ways that do not punish this demographic. While overprescribing is undoubtedly an issue, there are equally important underlying causes of addiction that would benefit from thorough analysis.