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

Macy shifts her focus to the city of Roanoke (her hometown) to show how the epidemic shifted from rural to suburban areas and from OxyContin to heroin. Suburban people around Roanoke became more aware of the opioid epidemic and the shift to heroin when news leaked of two local weathermen who were addicted to opioids; one nearly died of an overdose. Macy began covering the spread of opioid use in her community because she wanted to answer the questions of puzzled parents and because she wanted to “inoculate” (109) her own family.

Heroin dealers came to Roanoke in 2006 because it was a new, potentially lucrative market with less competition than the northeastern cities where they usually dealt. Macy traces how heroin dealers sold to two high school students in the Hidden Valley subdivision in Roanoke, Virginia, resulting in a series of devastating consequences. Parents missed or ignored obvious signs of drug addiction because they assumed heroin was a problem only among “the children of inner-city black families” (108-09).

Robin Roth suspected her son Scott was using drugs like marijuana; she didn’t suspect that Scott was injecting drugs like heroin because she assumed such behavior was one that occurred only in “‘seedy street slums’” (110) in cities.