51 pages • 1 hour read
Beth MacyDopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Suburban Sprawl”
Macy shifts her focus to the city of Roanoke (her hometown) to show how the epidemic shifted from rural to suburban areas and from OxyContin to heroin. Suburban people around Roanoke became more aware of the opioid epidemic and the shift to heroin when news leaked of two local weathermen who were addicted to opioids; one nearly died of an overdose. Macy began covering the spread of opioid use in her community because she wanted to answer the questions of puzzled parents and because she wanted to “inoculate” (109) her own family.
Heroin dealers came to Roanoke in 2006 because it was a new, potentially lucrative market with less competition than the northeastern cities where they usually dealt. Macy traces how heroin dealers sold to two high school students in the Hidden Valley subdivision in Roanoke, Virginia, resulting in a series of devastating consequences. Parents missed or ignored obvious signs of drug addiction because they assumed heroin was a problem only among “the children of inner-city black families” (108-09).
Robin Roth suspected her son Scott was using drugs like marijuana; she didn’t suspect that Scott was injecting drugs like heroin because she assumed such behavior was one that occurred only in “‘seedy street slums’” (110) in cities. She had the money to put Scott in rehabilitation once it became clear he was injecting drugs. She and her son attended 12-step programs, and she tried tough love—testing him for drugs weekly, taking away his car, and removing the interior doors from her house so she could monitor him.
Nevertheless, Scott died of a heroin overdose using drugs he got from Spencer Mumpower, the teenage son of another affluent Hidden Valley family. Spencer’s own family paid for his 15 stints in rehabilitation programs, and he has now served time in federal prison for selling Scott the drugs that killed him. Macy describes at length Spencer’s efforts to make amends and stay clean.
Although stories like these might seem incredible to readers, Macy explains that the suburbs were ripe for deaths like these because families were reluctant to talk openly about their children’s addictions. Although mothers like Robin Roth began sharing their stories and serving as an informal resource for other families, she was unusual in her outspokenness. Suburban families “mostly kept quiet about it, shut down in their grief and their shame” (121).
Chapter 6 Summary: “’Like Shooting Jesus’”
Macy describes the economic contexts for the epidemic. The opioid epidemic in rural America unfolded in the context of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1994 by the United States, Mexico, and Canada) and more trade agreements that led to the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China. The departure of big employers as a result of these agreements changed the economies of rural America. There were fewer jobs, and the ones that were available were so low paying that it became impossible to support a family. With few options to participate in the workforce, people depended on disability payments from the Social Security Administration or even the sale of diverted drugs to make it (drug diversion is when drugs are illicitly used by people for whom they are not prescribed). In the early 2010s, no one covered this story.
The economic context in suburban Virginia was somewhat different. Drug corridors already existed on Interstate I-81, which ran between cities like Baltimore and the Virginia suburbs. Many with addictions were affluent or middle-class people. Parents with means secured ADHD medication for their children by the 2010s, so teens were comfortable taking pills. Using cellphones, these same children were able to secure opioids without their parents’ knowledge. When teens became addicted to opioids, these same parents could afford cash-only drug rehabilitation programs that shielded them from the stigma of being middle-class/affluent and having a child with an addiction.
Purdue reformulated OxyContin to make it more tamper-resistant in 2010, but that change had an unintended consequence. Because heroin was cheaper and easier to secure, those with substance use disorders shifted to using heroin instead of OxyContin, regardless of their class or location.
Part 2, Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Macy further develops her analysis of the complex interactions between race and place in the context of the epidemic. Her main line of argument in these two chapters is that stereotypical ideas about who abuses drugs left suburban communities unprepared for dealing with a burgeoning heroin epidemic. The comforts that attract families to suburban life—access to transportation corridors that connect the suburbs to cities, schools and thriving social life for their children, healthcare, and an emphasis on strong family values—ultimately made these communities just as vulnerable to addiction as rural Appalachia.
The suburbs are also associated with the American stereotype of the happy nuclear family living on work that pays enough for a single-family home, creating upward mobility for children. The downside of that image is that failure to live up to it brings stigma. Macy zeroes in on the aptly named Hidden Valley to show that parents’ assumptions about drug abuse contributed to the unchecked, secret spread of the opioid epidemic. She includes anecdotes about Robin Roth, “a prominent white business-woman” (108) who assumed living in the suburbs would protect her son from intravenous drug use. Roth’s association between drug use and the inner city meant she ignored the primary source of drugs: students just like her son and the medicine cabinets of her neighbors. When opioids killed her son, Robin saw his death as a personal failing, so much so that she “felt as if she walked around Roanoke with a giant F on her forehead, branded as a parenting failure” (115).
It is the nature of stigma that prevents people from seeing themselves as part of something larger. In Robin’s case, she initially held Spencer Mumpower individually responsible for her son’s death. Macy includes a rich, detailed picture of Spencer as a likable, repentant, and engaging figure. He was not a monster, in other words, and had much in common with Scott Roth. He was part of Robin Roth’s community, a truth she realized as she got to know him and his own struggle with addiction.
Once Robin Roth began to place her son’s death in the context of an epidemic affecting others, she become active in working against stigma as a way of protecting her community; she realized that stories like hers were everywhere. The fact that opioids can exhaust even the deep resources of families like the Roths and communities like Hidden Valley is testament to the power of addiction. By showing that addiction cuts across the divide between rural and urban/suburban, Macy encourages readers outside these particular communities to see their own neighborhoods and homes as vulnerable to similar social problems.
