How to Begin Solving the Addiction Epidemic? “Dopesick” Author Beth Macy Has Ideas
During the three years I spent working on my new book, Raising Lazarus, my elderly mother kept asking me what it was about. At 93 with advanced dementia, no matter how often I reminded her, she couldn’t remember.
I kept the description simple: “It’s about addiction,” I said.
So it went, every half hour or so. Each time I answered, Mom would shake her head disapprovingly. She knew firsthand how sad the subject was, having been raised by an alcoholic and then marrying one.
“You should write a love story instead,” she sighed.
Mom was right. Addiction is a heartbreaking, confounding illness, which is why so many loved ones, leaders, and institutions prefer to avert their eyes, hoping the problem will solve itself, or at least not touch them. After nearly a decade spent educating myself on the issue, even I am still getting a grasp on how insidious and complex addiction is, and to what degree it's influenced who I am.
• • •
I know the pain—the sense of abandonment, embarrassment, and fear—of not being able to count on an addicted family member. Addiction cycles back through at least four generations of my family. If my mom’s dad was a mean drunk, my own dad was somewhat easier to manage: He was mainly an absent drunk.
He was a World War II veteran who dropped out of school in the seventh grade. By the time I came along—a surprise to my middle-aged parents and the youngest by far of four kids—he was a serially unemployed house painter. He spent most days at the VFW bar drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, then staggering the eight blocks home on foot. There were periodic attempts at sobriety, including an out-of-state rehab stint that I was too young to comprehend, after which tiny Alcoholics Anonymous books would appear around the house.
But my dad could never maintain his sobriety. After a few weeks, the miniature devotionals would disappear, and he would make his way back to the VFW.
His friends called him “Shakey,” for it was said that, even during his worst bouts of DTs, Ted Macy could still paint a beautifully straight line. On the rare weeks when he worked, my mom would take me with her to the bar at dusk on Fridays to retrieve his paycheck before he drank or gambled it away. I was around eight then.
From an early age, it was the poverty I most blamed, not really grasping that it was mainly Dad’s alcoholism that kept us poor and prevented us from having what "normal" families had. I was so ashamed that we lived in the crappiest-looking house on the block that I’d ask the parents of friends to drop me off down the street at the corner, though everyone in our small Ohio town knew where we lived. I rarely invited anyone over, especially after a school acquaintance visited, and taking one look at our outdated kitchen appliances and shower-less bathroom, exclaimed: “It’s like the 1950s in here!” I was humiliated.
By junior high, there was a lot of talk about whether “the gas man” was going to turn off the heat during the Blizzard of ‘78 and how to run the truck my dad had bought (very much against Mom’s wishes) out of gas in the driveway before the repo man came—Mom’s idea. Poor repo guy would have to refill the tank himself if he wanted to outwit my plucky mom, who worked in a local factory when the economy was good and picked up jobs babysitting and waitressing when it wasn’t.
I can fit my few good memories of Dad—most involving food—into a tidy paragraph: the cashews and Cokes he bought me at the VFW when we caught him in a good mood (roughly between the second and fifth beer); the delicious morel mushrooms he foraged and mom fried in the iron skillet; the few times the three of us went fishing together. After his truck got repossessed, Dad’s boss gave him a beat-up sedan, which he hand-painted with leftover house paint. It was inexplicably two-toned: half tan and half Day-Glo orange. I was so mortified by the car's look that I refused to ride in it except for one fishing trip to Muzzy’s Lake. On the rainy drive home, Dad’s fishing poles rattled against the metal minnow bucket as we sang along to “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille” on his AM radio; that was a singularly fine afternoon.
My dad’s alcoholism hardened around the time I became a moody adolescent, prone to sneaking a few beers myself. At 15, I “borrowed” a relative’s car, picked up a friend, and went to Dickie Pooh’s, a drive-through liquor store, to buy a six-pack—showing off. Thank God OxyContin wasn’t around then.
Months would go by when my dad and I lived in the same house but didn’t speak, which I didn’t give much thought to because I didn’t know differently, though I knew my friends’ dads didn’t stagger into their Christmas trees, leaving a trail of tinsel en route to passing out in their bedrooms. It was like living in the back story of “The Andy Griffith Show” with Mayberry’s loveable town drunk, Otis, albeit minus the laugh track.
My dad didn’t attend my sports games, band concerts, ballgames, or plays. When I graduated from high school, it didn’t even occur to me that he might show. His absence was even preferable.
The following year, Mom called me at college to say that Dad was dying of late-stage lung cancer. She was in tears, but my overwhelming feeling was sadness for my mother—and, I admit, relief.
In a family picture taken a few years later, I’m wearing my college cap and gown, flanked by siblings and our mom, standing in front of the old VW Beetle I'd paid for with a student loan. When I graduated from college, I became the first in my family to do so. It felt miraculous. What I wanted more than anything else was to never be poor again, and most importantly, to be nothing like my father, whose memory still shamed me. And later, when I saw how exquisitely my own husband cared for our children, I began to understand how discombobulating it had been for me to have a parent who was so unpredictable. I envied my own kids the stability I'd never gotten from my father, and I stewed in my resentment of him.
• • •
When Dopesick premiered as a television series last year on Hulu, it reached a vastly larger audience than my book had. I was shocked by the number of viewers who, twenty-five years after Purdue Pharma first introduced OxyContin, got in touch to tell us that after watching the series, they realized they'd been blaming the victims for their opioid addictions, rather than the Sacklers, who were the true villains. I was especially moved by one mother's admission that the show had prompted her to reach out to her addicted son after three years during which they hadn't spoken.
I reflected on what we were hearing from all the relatives and loved ones of the addicted, and recalled the day that our showrunner and creator Danny Strong playfully suggested that I portray a minor character named Barbara Mullins in the third episode. I agreed to do it. The scene, set in 2002, was shot in a VFW hall in a small Virginia mining town, where the community had come together to discuss the spike they were seeing in addiction-related crime. As Mullins, the editor of a journal titled Pain, my role entailed parroting Purdue Pharma’s talking points—there’s nothing wrong with OxyContin; the problem is the addicts who are abusing it, ruining it for those with legitimate pain.
With its fake smoke, worn barstools, and dim lighting, the scene took me back to those Friday night VFW visits with Dad when I believed he just didn’t care about us. And it hit me: everything I'd learned about addiction also applied to my Dad. It was time to show a little mercy.
I’m 58 now, the same age he was when he died, and driving by the old house with my husband of 32 years still fills me with a mixture of nostalgia and shame. It’s taken decades to reconcile the hurt I suffered as a child with the knowledge I now have about addiction, the illness my father was suffering from.
I stigmatized my dad and his disease out of my own fear and ignorance, and I was still doing it, all these years after his death. It was understandable that as a child or young adult, I would need to blame him for what he couldn't give me. But in working with and getting to know the other people with substance use disorders, I'd learned to feel compassion for them. I'd come to understand that it's easier to stigmatize than to acknowledge the complexity of the problem and all the insufficiencies of the systems that could help treat it. At least in retrospect, I could show him that compassion.
My mom never got the romance novel she wished I would write. But in Raising Lazarus, I have written a kind of love story about how to help those who are still struggling and looking for forgiveness—from themselves and from those whose lives they’ve put through the wringer. I’ll never get a chance to tell my dad what I’ve learned through years of working in the trenches of the opioid crisis, and the perspective it’s given me on his struggle. But for others, like the woman who called her son after years of estrangement, it’s not too late to break the silence.
Beth Macy is the author of Dopesick and an executive producer and cowriter on the Hulu series of the same name. Her book, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis, will publish on August 16.
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