American Overdose
The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A comprehensive portrait of a uniquely American epidemic -- devastating in its findings and damning in its conclusions
The opioid epidemic has been described as "one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine." But calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of the history of greed, corruption, and indifference that pushed the US into consuming more than 80 percent of the world's opioid painkillers.
Journeying through lives and communities wrecked by the epidemic, Chris McGreal reveals not only how Big Pharma hooked Americans on powerfully addictive drugs, but the corrupting of medicine and public institutions that let the opioid makers get away with it.
The starting point for McGreal's deeply reported investigation is the miners promised that opioid painkillers would restore their wrecked bodies, but who became targets of "drug dealers in white coats."
A few heroic physicians warned of impending disaster. But American Overdose exposes the powerful forces they were up against, including the pharmaceutical industry's coopting of the Food and Drug Administration and Congress in the drive to push painkillers -- resulting in the resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland. McGreal tells the story, in terms both broad and intimate, of people hit by a catastrophe they never saw coming. Years in the making, its ruinous consequences will stretch years into the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The U.S.'s opioid epidemic stems from slippery medical and corporate ethics, shoddy research, and lax government oversight, journalist McGreal reveals in his incisive debut. Opening with the story of a shady undertaker-turned-pill-purveyor, McGreal takes the reader into clinics that churned out prescriptions for painkillers like assembly-line widgets, rarely requiring follow-up appointments or other checks on patient progress when issuing refills. He tells tales of individuals whose quest for pain relief turned them into addicts and often took their lives, leaving heartbroken family and friends behind and sending thousands of children into foster care. He writes that classism played a role in the reluctance of the FDA to address the crisis; many victims came from low-income areas such as rural West Virginia, and OxyContin became known as "hillbilly heroin." Finally, the book describes in detail how lobbyists for both the pharmaceutical industry and in some cases the medical establishment, who were profiting greatly from the dangerous drugs, thwarted early efforts, in the first years of the 21st century, by doctors and others to sound the alarm to Purdue (OxyContin's manufacturer), the FDA, and the medical establishment. This urgent, readable chronicle, which names names and pulls no punches, clearly and compassionately illuminates the evolution of America's mass addiction problem.
