Given the scale of the problem, there is no magic bullet.

Throughout Raising Lazarus, Macy applies herself to solutions. “The fear among public health experts is that it will go to traditional drug-war modalities and not toward evidence-based care.” “There are so many communities that haven’t studied the most efficacious way to use it,” Macy says.

Last year, fentanyl-related deaths surpassed 107,000, more than double the toll of the early 2000s.Īs millions of dollars from opioid-litigation settlements begin to flow to states and municipalities, the question becomes how to ensure such funds are used to address opioid abuse and not – as happened with big tobacco in the 1990s – diverted to unrelated endeavors. What used to come in labelled plastic pill bottles with child-proof lids now comes in 50-gallon drums. “As a society we have made it so hard to hold rich people that break the law accountable.”įentanyl manufacturing runs from precursors sourced in India and formulated in China to distribution via Mexico to the US. “Everybody had different goals in mind but the main thing is how to get victims’ voices heard and how to get accountability,” Macy says. It shouldn’t be that cutting-edge care is delivered by a guy in a Prius Nan Goldin, the photographer-activist who led a campaign to force museums to remove the Sackler name the lawyer Mike Quinn, who led a campaign for victims’ voices to be heard in the Purdue bankruptcy and Ed Bisch, an IT worker in New Jersey who lost his son to Oxycontin, who now works to hold the Sacklers accountable.

Macy reports on the people, often personally motivated and detached from any official policy response, whose central purpose is to get victims’ voices heard and to achieve accountability from companies and executives behind the flood of opioids, including Purdue Pharma and the members of the Sackler family, in the initial wave of the crisis. “We now have a generation of drug users that started with heroin and fentanyl.” “At this point, too much attention is focused on stemming the oversupply of prescription opioids,” Macy writes. Raising Lazarus is more personal, and looks more closely at what can be done to solve the opioid abuse mess, even as it morphs away from the pharmaceutical industry mis-marketing that started it. It became the touchstone account of a sprawling crisis of corporate malfeasance and regulatory mismanagement that largely eluded the criminal justice system despite killing about a million people. Macy’s previous book, Dopesick, charted the rise of prescription painkillers through the 1990s and early 2000s.

Dopesick author