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.
