Review: 'Raising Lazarus,' by Beth Macy

When you think about it, a lot of good narrative journalism is sought by readers already sharing the writer's views and wishing to understand more. A genre that might be slighted as "preaching to the choir" is potent for readers seeking to organize their thinking and contribute to solving social problems. Recent titles include "Caste" (Isabel Wilkerson on racism), "The Sixth Extinction" (Elizabeth Kolbert on global warming) and "Surviving Autocracy" (Masha Gessen on authoritarian government).

Beth Macy's "Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis" is another remarkable book of this sort, bursting with lucid and crucial argumentation.

Macy's 2018 book, "Dopesick," offered a relentless, deeply researched account of the legal pursuit and case against the Sackler family, who tried to protect the billions of dollars they made dominating the market for painkillers by misrepresenting OxyContin as hardly addictive.

Faced with widespread negative research findings and soaring overdoses, the manufacturer had handed doctors luxury vacations and free dinners — plus bonuses for upping their sales volume. The family was finally compelled to declare bankruptcy in a settlement that, alas, also granted them immunity from prosecution, and spread its multibillion-dollar payout to affected states over decades.

The settlement is dwarfed, however, by the trillion dollars the Centers for Disease Control estimates that the opioid crisis costs the U.S. annually.

"Raising Lazarus," the companion volume to "Dopesick," celebrates an admirable handful of humble practitioners fighting against this commercially administered plague. Its heroes, portrayed in their gritty, tedious, complex situations, include officials in state and federal regulatory apparatus, nurses, doctors and former addicts who have organized harm-reduction measures such as informal clean-needle exchanges, testing for hepatitis and distribution of Naloxone and Buprenorphen, which has been shown to ease the painful withdrawal ("dopesickness") that keeps addicts addicted.

The book has a poverty-conscious whisper of Liberation Theology running through it, while making no demands upon readers beyond compassion for the souls who've gotten themselves in this jam and ride it into scuzzy self-neglect.

These two volumes have informed the current Hulu eight-part TV drama "Dopesick" that's already prying open the minds of some legislators and law enforcement officials in Appalachia.

Macy's books offer frank "advocacy journalism" of the refreshing sort that calls out selfish lies. The straight-up flavor of her writing is delightful if you believe her, and it's hard not to. Take this line describing a judge overturning the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement in favor of heavier penalties, "The [Sackler] family's greed had finally reared back to bite them in the ass, if only temporarily."

There are a lot of enjoyable sentences like that. Try: "No one ... should have to decide between a jail cell and a rehab that had already failed to work," or, "America remains the only developed country on the planet where it's easier to get high than it is to get help."

"Dopesick" and "Raising Lazarus" are reverse Pandora's Boxes. They are not only fascinating reading but also powerful guides to remedying widespread sickness, misery and death.

Mark Kramer, author, professor and writer-in-residence at Smith College and Boston University, also founded and directed the Nieman Conference and Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard.

Raising Lazarus
By: Beth Macy.
Publisher: Little, Brown, 400 pages, $30.