freebeacon.com
REVIEW: ‘Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis’
It must be nice to be Beth Macy. The bestselling author of Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America and now Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis, sees the world in black and white. For Macy, whose cliché-ridden prose borders on painful, the fact that there were 100,000 overdose deaths between May 2020 and April 2021 can be blamed almost entirely on corporate greed. The people who are using drugs are victims of an economic and political system that is stacked against them, created almost entirely by an army of evil Republicans. And the only way to help ordinary Americans is to take profits from drug companies, dismantle the criminal justice system, and institute socialized medicine. Macy is almost always wrong, but never in doubt.
It is easy to see why Macy got an audience when Dopesick was published. She actually spent time in the parts of the country—particularly Appalachia—that were being overrun by opioids. (She had previously published a book called Factory Man about manufacturing jobs leaving America.) She interviewed users and dealers and chronicled the desperate lives that were destroyed by drugs. She wasn’t the first, but at a time when many readers were still trying to figure out what was behind Trump’s victory, Macy offered them a story. She grew up in this world and her own family and friends have been touched by the devastation.
She prides herself on her gritty reporting but unfortunately, it’s full of banalities like, “I spoke with Bisch multiple times most weeks. … I know how he takes his coffee, that he calls sub sandwiches hoagies, that he pronounces the word huge ‘yu-u-ge.’” Talk about seeing into someone’s soul.
