Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Drug overdose had already taken the lives of 300,000 Americans over the past fifteen years, and experts now predicted that 300,000 more would die in only the next five. It is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of fifty, killing more people than guns or car accidents, at a rate higher than the HIV epidemic at its peak.”

Macy relies on appeals to logic such as statistics that help readers relate the epidemic to other well-known epidemics to help readers understand the urgency of dealing with the epidemic. Appeals to logic are key parts of the journalist’s rhetorical toolbox, so this move helps Macy establish credibility early in the text.

“The addicted were now termed ‘junkies,’ inner-city users who supported their habit by collecting and selling scrap metal. The “respectable” upper- and middle-class opium and morphine addicts having died out, the remaining addicted were reclassified as criminals, not patients.”

Macy provides historical context to show how drug use went from being normalized to being criminalized. Her attention to shifts in representation of people who use drugs helps her develop the theme of Race, Place, and the War on Drugs.

“Purdue handpicked the physicians who were most susceptible to their marketing, using information that bought from a data mining network, IMS health, to determine which doctors in which towns prescribe the most competing painkillers. If a doctor was already prescribing lots of Percocet and Vicodin, a rep was sent out to deliver a pitch about OxyContin’s potency and longer lasting action. The higher the decile—a term reps used as a predictor of a doctor's potential for prescribing whatever drug they're hawking—the more visits that doctor received from a rep, who often brought along “reminders” such as OxyContin-branded clocks for the exam room walls.”

Macy’s description paints Purdue Pharma’s marketing campaign for OxyContin as one that surgically targeted doctors who were already overprescribing drugs and thus contributing to addiction to prescription drugs. Tactics like these support Macy’s argument that the opioid epidemic is the result of corporate greed.