Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,128
stigma of addiction is astonishing. May our poet rest in peace.
Notes
PROLOGUE
Interviews: Ronnie Jones, Don Burke, Kristi Fernandez
I walked along the manicured entranceway: Author interview, Ronnie Jones, Hazelton Federal Correctional Institution, Bruceton Mills, WV, Aug. 11, 2016.
the prison had taken over: Hazelton is the largest employer in Preston County, according to the Preston County Economic Development Authority website and Hazelton management, via email to author, July 13, 2017.
“Exactly who have you spoken to”: Email to author via CorrLinks federal prison monitored email: July 18, 2016.
a single batch of heroin was about to land: “26 Overdoses in Just Hours: Inside a Community on the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic,” Andrew Joseph, STAT, Aug. 22, 2016.
West Virginia’s indigent burial-assistance program: Christopher Ingraham, “Drugs Are Killing So Many People in West Virginia That the State Can’t Keep Up with the Funerals,” Washington Post, March 7, 2017.
Drug overdose had already taken: Jeanine M. Buchanich, Lauren C. Balmert, and Donald C. Burke, “Exponential Growth of the USA Overdose Epidemic,” doi/10.1101/134403 (extrapolates 300,000 more opioid deaths in the next five years, based on graphs studied from 1979 to 2015); other forecasts using similar data are outlined in Max Blau, “STAT Forecast: Opioids Could Kill Nearly 500,000 Americans in the Next Decade,” STAT, June 27, 2017.
It is now the leading cause: Josh Katz, “Fentanyl Overtakes Heroin as Leading Cause of U.S. Drug Deaths,” Global NAIJA News, Sept. 3, 2017.
Kristi Fernandez and I stood: Author interview, Kristi Fernandez, May 23, 2016.
When a new drug sweeps the country: Author interview, historian David Courtwright; the advent of the opioid epidemic was masterfully chronicled for the first time in Paul Tough, “The Alchemy of OxyContin,” New York Times Magazine, July 29, 2001.
the German elixir peddlers at Bayer: Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 69; David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47; Courtwright, “Preventing and Treating Narcotic Addiction—A Century of Federal Drug Control,” New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 26, 2015. Per capita consumption of opiates tripled in the 1870s and 1880s.
CHAPTER ONE. THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA
Interviews: Lt. Richard Stallard, Nancy D. Campbell, Dr. John Burton, Dr. David Davis
young parents can die of heroin overdose one day: Kristine Phillips, “A Young Couple Died of Overdose, Police Say. Their Baby Died of Starvation Days Later,” Washington Post, Dec. 25, 2016. The deaths occurred in the Kernville neighborhood of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, sixty miles east of Pittsburgh.
“Half a million people are dead”: Lenny Bernstein and Joel Achenbach, “A Group of Middle-Aged Whites in the U.S. Is Dying at a Startling Rate,” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2015.
“diseases of despair”: That wording became a shorthand for Case and Deaton’s work in the wake of a subsequent study by the pair, published in March 2017, according to Joel Achenbach and Dan Keating, “New Research Identifies a ‘Sea of Despair’ Among White, Working-Class Americans,” Washington Post, March 23, 2017.The language is also used in a follow-up story, Jeff Guo, “The Disease Killing White Americans Goes Way Deeper Than Opioids,” Washington Post, March 24, 2017.
Kaiser Family Foundation poll: Bianca DiJulio, Jamie Firth, Liz Hamel, and Mollyann Brodie, “Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: November 2015,” kff/health-reform/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-november-2015/.
Nationwide, the difference in life expectancy: Steven Rattner, “2016 in Charts. (And Can Trump Deliver in 2017?),” New York Times, Jan. 3, 2017.
in Appalachia, those disparities are even starker: A 65 percent higher overdose mortality rate in Appalachia: Michael Meit et al., “Appalachian Diseases of Despair,” prepared for the Appalachian Regional Commission, Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis, August 2017.
people hadn’t yet begun locking: The early history of the modern-day epidemic shows that some of the largest concentrations of overdose deaths were in Appalachia, the Southwest, and New England, according to Lauren M. Rossen et al., “Drug Poisoning Mortality: United States, 2002–2014,” National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Aug. 25, 2016.
Stallard was sitting in his patrol car: Author interview, Big Stone Gap police lieutenant Richard Stallard (now retired), April 29, 2016.
snorters overcame their aversion to needles: Paul Tough, “The Alchemy of OxyContin,” New York Times Magazine, July 29, 2001.
“Delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin”: Attachment B to Plea Agreement, United States v. The Purdue Frederick Company, Inc., and Michael Friedman, Howard R. Udell, and Paul D. Goldenheim, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Abingdon Division, from lawsuit’s “Agreed Statement of Facts” outlining the company’s original claims, 6; last modified May 8, 2007.
The company was virtually unheard of: Michael Moore, “Lodi