Beth Macy > Quotes

“America’s approach to its opioid problem is to rely on Battle of Dunkirk strategies—leaving the fight to well-meaning citizens, in their fishing vessels and private boats—when what’s really needed to win the war is a full-on Normandy Invasion.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Opioids are now on pace to kill as many Americans in a decade as HIV/AIDS has since it began, with leveling-off projections tenuously predicted in a nebulous, far-off future: sometime after 2020.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Americans, representing 4.4 percent of the world’s population, consume roughly 30 percent of its opioids.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for truly no good law enforcement reason.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“There were leaders here and elsewhere who agreed with the woman, he knew, including an Ohio sheriff who'd recently proposed taking naloxone away from his deputies, claiming that repeated overdose reversals were "sucking the taxpayers dry." Lloyd thought immediately of the answer Jesus gave when his disciple asked him to enumerate the concept of forgiveness. Should it be granted seven times, Peter wanted to know, or should a sinner be forgiven as many as seventy times? In the shadow of the church steeples, Lloyd let Jesus answer the woman's question: "Seventy times seven," he said.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“The more we talk about the epidemic as an individual disease phenomenon or a moral failing, the easier it is to obfuscate and ignore the social and economic conditions that predispose certain individuals to addiction. The fix isn't more Suboxone or lectures on morality but rather a reinvigorated democracy that provides a pathway for meaningful work, with a living wage, for everybody.”
― Beth Macy, 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.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“But you can't put a corporation in jail; you just take their money, and it's not really their money anyway.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“The term “hipster,” in fact, drew from the Chinese opium smoker of the 1800s, who’d spent much of his time smoking while reclining on one hip. The hipster counterculture took inspiration from heroin-addicted jazz greats like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“The corporation feels no pain.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Sober for seven years, Spencer had replaced his heroin and methamphetamine addiction with martial arts even before he’d left for federal prison. The jujitsu practice had sustained him throughout his incarceration—even when his girlfriend dumped him and when his former martial-arts teacher and onetime father figure was arrested and jailed for taking indecent liberties with a teenage female student. Spencer stuck to his recovery and to his prison workouts, ignoring the copious drugs that had been smuggled inside, and he read voraciously about mixed martial arts. Using the Bureau of Prisons’ limited email system, he had Ginger copy articles about various MMA fighters—laboriously pasting in one block of text at a time—so he could memorize pro tips and workout strategies and, eventually, through her, reach out directly to fighters and studio owners for advice.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“If my own child were turning tricks on the streets, enslaved not only by the drug but also criminal dealers and pimps, I would want her to have the benefit of maintenance drugs, even if she sometimes misused them or otherwise figured out how to glean a subtle high from the experience. If my child's fear of dopesickness was so outsized that she refused even MAT, I would want her to have access to clean needles that prevented her from getting HIV and/or hepatitis C and potentially spreading them to others.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Local news once served as democracy’s immune system. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Death by drugs is now a national problem, but the crisis began as an epidemic of overprescribed painkillers in the distressed communities that were least likely to muster the resources to fight back. It erupted in rural fishing villages, coal communities, and mill towns—because Purdue’s sales strategy was to convince doctors that the nation’s injured miners and factory workers were better and more safely served by OxyContin than its weaker competitors. The company even maneuvered to convince the FDA to back this bogus claim.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“it’s not the poorest people who support Trump. It’s the richest people in the poorest places,” Mason told me.[15] Trump not only cut their taxes but also made it okay for them to hate political correctness of all sorts, including people of different gender and racial identities.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Words linger and words matter, I learned, and it’s not possible to predict the fallout they can have on a subject’s life.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“The latest research on substance use disorder from Harvard Medical School shows it takes the typical opioid-addicted user eight years—and four to five treatment attempts—to achieve remission for just a single year. And yet only about 10 percent of the addicted population manages to get access to care and treatment for a disease that has roughly the same incidence rate as diabetes.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Whatever rules you make, you better stick to them. Your son or daughter depends on it. They will call your bluff on everything. Don't you budge. Changing the rules only confuses a young, developing mind.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“But there is still only one treatment bed available for every five people trying to get into rehab, and at a cost far beyond the financial reach of most heroin users.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Because there is no love you can throw on them, no hug big enough that will change the power of that drug; it is just beyond imagination how controlling and destructive it is.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“In a windowless nook of a downtown Roanoke funeral parlor, not far from where Tess once roamed the streets, Patricia caressed the back of the scar, as if cupping a baby's head, and told her poet goodbye. It was January 2, Tess's birthday. She would have been twenty-nine. Patricia tucked the treasures of her daughter's life inside the vest--a picture of her boy and one of his cotton onesies that was Tess's favorite, some strands of Koda's hair, and a sand dollar.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“NAFTA took nearly a million jobs away, and the trade agreements that followed it were responsible for the loss of a staggering four million more jobs, most of them in manufacturing. The Great Recession slashed another two million jobs and twenty-five thousand businesses.[11] The average laid-off factory worker suffered a 19.2 percent fall in their standard of living, with Chinese imports reducing roughly a third of all Americans’ incomes, delivering a disproportionate blow to rural areas and small towns.[12] The international conglomerate Honeywell Aerospace would end up owning Grimes Manufacturing. “I don’t even know where it’s based,” said Rich Ebert, the county’s director of economic development.[13] (Honeywell’s corporate headquarters are in Charlotte, North Carolina.) There is no Old Man Honeywell who has at least some of Urbana’s interests at heart. Cheaper furniture and blue jeans notwithstanding, displaced American workers are still waiting on Clinton’s win-win to land. In the transition to a “twenty-first-century economy,” hollowed-out communities and even whole regions were largely treated as collateral damage.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“We talk about systemic racism, misogyny, and LGBTQ rights, but we don’t talk enough about how, for fifty years now, this strange evangelical-slash-Catholic movement has been trying to infiltrate the government and turn our country into a religious nation,” Mason said. “We’ve never faced it in any kind of organized way or even said out loud that it exists!”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“In my hometown, the number of children living in poverty has more than tripled since I left.[4] The number orphaned by the opioid crisis has tripled just since 2015.[5] After the jobs went away, heroin helped itself to my hometown, followed by fentanyl and meth. The result of that one-two punch has been a preponderance of trauma that is overtaxing every system meant to address it. “Backward mobility,” economists call this devastating trend, exacerbated by the Great Recession. As corporate profits soared, the median wage for workers, adjusted for inflation, stagnated, and the cost of housing, education, and health care far outpaced inflation. In the four decades between my graduation and Silas’s, inequality grew so dramatically in the United States that the richest 0.01 percent of Americans have accumulated the same amount of wealth as the poorest 50 percent.[6]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. —Flannery O’Connor[2]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“I think we all need to own a little raw piece of this history. And to own it, we need to understand it and acknowledge it. As Julius Lester has said, “History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart, and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”
― Beth Macy, Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

“The whole system needs revamped,” said Tracey Helton Mitchell, a recovering heroin user, author, and activist. “In the United States, we are very attached to our twelve-step rehabs, which are not affordable, not standardized from one place to another, and not necessarily effective” for the opioid-addicted.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Americans, representing 4.4 percent of the world’s population, consume roughly 30 percent of its opioids.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“The most interesting people doing this work are the ones who can hold on to both ideas rather than just giving simple and pious-sounding statements…like ‘This is a health issue, not a crime.’ When at the same time you have addicted people who are committing crimes, including violent crimes, you have to [deliver justice] for the woman whose [drug-using] boyfriend just broke her nose.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis

“Shadowing Tim Nolan, the sixty-two-year-old nurse-practitioner, reminded me of a quote I’d first heard from an addiction doctor in Massachusetts. He said the solution to the epidemic could be summed up in a single quote from a Harvard physician in 1926: “The secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”
― Beth Macy, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis