Beth Macy
Bestselling Author of the book Dopesick & Executive Producer of its Emmy-winning Hulu series adaptation
Beth Macy is the author of the critically acclaimed and New York Times-bestselling books, Factory Man, Truevine, and Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (2018). Macy serves as an Executive Producer and writer on the acclaimed Hulu limited television series Dopesick, which is based on her book. Her latest book is 2022’s Raising Lazarus: The Search for Hope and Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis, the crucial next installment in the story of the defining disaster of our era, one that touches every single one of us, whether directly or indirectly.
Growing out of three decades of reporting from the same Virginia communities,
as her prior books did, Dopesick unpacks the most intractable social problems of
our time: the opioid crisis, set against a landscape of job loss, corporate greed
and stigma, along with the families and first responders who are heroically
fighting back. Overdose deaths are now the equivalent of a jetliner crashing in
our country every day, and yet the government response to the epidemic
remains, in a word, impotent.
Dopesick is, in many ways, the sequel to Macy's first book, FACTORY MAN. It lays out exactly how the jobless “other America” ended up couch-surfing with the likes of surgeon’s daughters and civic leaders’ kids who fall prey to prostitution, jail, and even death. Tom Hanks describes Dopesick as “a deep — and deeply needed — look into the troubled soul of America.” Stanford addiction medicine specialist and author Dr. Anna Lembke calls it the first book to capture the entirety of the epidemic, “with a fast-paced narrative, colorful and inspiring characters, vivid historical detail, and a profound sense of place.”
A longtime reporter specializing in outsiders and underdogs, Macy has won over a dozen national journalism awards, including a Lukas Prize for Factory Man, multiple shortlist and best-book-of-the-year honors for Truevine, and a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard for her newspaper writing.
A frequent speaker, teacher, and essayist, Macy has been published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Oprah magazine, and Parade. Her approach to storytelling: Report from the ground up, establish trust, be patient, find stories that tap into universal truths. Get out of your ZIP code. To do good journalism, be a human first.
Her book, Raising Lazarus, Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Drug Crisis (August 2022), focuses on solutions to the opioid crisis and the heroic efforts of frontline workers who are applying harm reduction practices on the streets of America. It also will document the efforts of activists and parents of the dead who are trying to hold the Sackler family accountable for the crisis they helped create.
Follow her on Twitter @papergirlmacy
Jenny Anchondo is a Emmy-Award-winning news anchor, host and reporter. She has worked for CBS, NBC and Fox at TV stations all over the country. Most recently, she was the co-host of the nationally syndicated show, Morning Dose.
