In 2016 opioids killed an average of 10.3 people per 100,000 in this country. Today, there are some 2.6 million people addicted to opiates nationwide, and overdoses are the leading cause of death for those under age 50. In her compassionate and revelatory investigation of the country’s twenty-plus year opioid crisis, Macy gives these statistics meaning by telling the stories of hard-hit western Virginia communities. Revisiting some of the places that figured in Factory Man, her study of the socio-economic effects of outsourcing labor, Macy traces the combined roles of joblessness, aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies, regulatory laxness, and an increasingly medicalized culture to explain how so many become so quickly addicted to painkillers like OxyContin, and why the addiction is so hard to break. Macy will be in conversation with Dan Vergano, science reporter at BuzzFeed News.
