Although Macy’s stories are set in Virginia, they could happen anywhere in the United States. This exhaustively reported book includes many heartbreaking examples of young lives lost to drugs, sometimes so suddenly that parents had been unaware of the problem, sometimes after repeated efforts to help a child get clean in rehabilitation facilities or treatment programs. Van Zee’s efforts were chronicled in “Pain Killer,” a 2003 book by New York Times reporter Barry Meier, one of the first journalists to aggressively cover the Ox圜ontin story. Among them was Art Van Zee, a dedicated Virginia country doctor who launched a petition drive in 2001 asking the FDA to remove Ox圜ontin from the market. A few alert doctors, pharmacists, clinic workers and local health officials tried to sound an alarm. In the late 1990s, soon after Purdue Pharma began an aggressive national marketing campaign for its new, long-acting painkiller, Ox圜ontin, patients hooked on that drug began showing up in clinics and emergency rooms in rural America - in farming and coal-mining counties, in economically depressed Midwestern factory towns, in logging and fishing communities in Maine. A Roanoke-based reporter, Macy had a front-row seat for the pain pill epidemic’s march through rural and small-town western Virginia, moving south to north on a path roughly parallel to U.S.
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