On Christmas Eve, 2017, Tess Henry was found dead in a dumpster in Las
Vegas. Tess was a 28-year-old new mother, a former honor roll student,
and a high school basketball player from suburban Roanoke, Virginia, a
place ravaged by the national opioid crisis. The New York Times
best-selling author Beth Macy chronicled Tess and her mom, Patricia,
through Tess' harrowing, years-long battle to recover from heroin
addiction in her award-winning book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the
Drug Company That Addicted America. But just as Tess was on the brink
of returning to a normal life with her young son, she was brutally
murdered.
Finding Tess: A Mother's Search for Answers in a Dopesick America is a
psychosocial autopsy of sorts, not just a retracing of Tess' final steps
on the streets of Las Vegas but also a dissection of what went wrong
during the six-year span of her opioid addiction as well as the changes
inspired by her story. This exclusive audio documentary - a coda to
Dopesick - features interviews with Tess, her family, and many of
those who tried to help her along the way as well as the systems and the
people who failed her. By tracing Tess' final steps as she tried so hard
to make her way back to Virginia - and to her son - Finding Tess
illuminates a journey shared by too many of the 2.6 million Americans
battling opioid addiction, offering lessons from a cast of unlikely
heroes and, along with them, hope.
