These are all the places where we could be touching this huge group of American citizens who are suffering from this treatable medical condition, but we're just simply not doing it." On how "Raising Lazarus" came to be following "Dopesick": And so most hospitals, when somebody shows up for an overdose, or an abscess, or some other injection-related disease, don't have a way to put people on MAT. Most jails and prisons, which have been our country's de facto response to addiction, don't allow inmates to be on MAT. Most drug courts don't allow participants to be on MAT. Many rehabs, in fact, most rehabs still don't allow people to be on MAT, medication-assisted treatment, which is buprenorphine or methadone. But because addiction was always kind of a stepchild, not held within our healthcare system, because we don't have universal healthcare.
Now we know that buprenorphine and methadone are the gold standard of care for people with opioid use disorder. "Basically, we have an 87% treatment gap, which means that only 13% of people have been able to access any treatment at all in the last year. And they're not going to die from it generally, but it becomes this outsized fear of withdrawal." On what the treatment landscape looks like: And so if they don't have them, what they have is not only crushing anxiety and depression but also this physical withdrawal, which every person I've interviewed describes as like the worst flu times 100 it's diarrhea, nausea, restless leg, vomiting. And so when oxycontin or heroin flood those receptors, what happens is the body quickly gets used to having that receptor being flooded, and so if you don't have them, basically, your normal amount of opioids that we make in the body don't work anymore. And what prescribed opioids do - they're called exogenous opioids - is they flood the opioid receptors with way more opioids than is naturally made in the body. "So opioids are different from other classes of drug in that we all make natural opioids. Interview Highlights On how opioids affect the brain: WFDD’s Bethany Chafin spoke with the author prior to her appearance at the WFDD Book Club.
Woven throughout these profiles, Macy also dives into the intricacies of the litigation aimed at holding Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family accountable. Author Beth Macy’s latest book, “Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis,” documents those who are on the ground working in harm reduction across the United States.
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