Join Countway Library and HMS Center for Bioethics for an author talk with Beth Macy about her book, Raising Lazarus.

Nearly a decade into the second wave of America's overdose crisis, pharmaceutical companies have yet to answer for the harms they created. As pending court battles against opioid makers, distributors, and retailers drag on, addiction rates have soared to record-breaking levels during the COVID pandemic, illustrating the critical need for leadership, urgency, and change. Meanwhile, there is scant consensus between law enforcement and medical leaders, nor an understanding of how to truly scale the programs that are out there, working at the ragged edge of capacity and actually saving lives.

Distilling this massive, unprecedented national health crisis down to its character-driven emotional core as only she can, Beth Macy takes us into the country’s hardest hit places to witness the devastating personal costs that one-third of America's families are now being forced to shoulder. Here we meet the ordinary people fighting for the least of us with the fewest resources, from harm reductionists risking arrest to bring lifesaving care to the homeless and addicted to the activists and bereaved families pushing to hold Purdue and the Sackler family accountable. These heroes come from all walks of life; what they have in common is an up-close and personal understanding of addiction that refuses to stigmatize—and therefore abandon—people who use drugs, as big pharma execs and many politicians are all too ready to do. 

About the author:

Beth Macy is a Virginia-based journalist who writes about outsiders and underdogs. Raised in a small Ohio town, she is the award-winning author of three New York Times bestselling books that have examined communities left behind by corporate greed and political indifference. Her first book, Factory Man, explored the aftermath of globalization and won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize. Dopesick was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. Dopesick was made into a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Hulu series on which Macy served as an executive producer and cowriter. Her 2022 book, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis, was a follow-up to Dopesick and explored on-the-ground solutions to the nation’s drug epidemic.

A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2010 Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard, Macy has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Her next book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, is a combination memoir and reported analysis of the rural-urban divide told through the lenses of declining upward mobility, polarization, and the decimation of local and regional news. Penguin Press will publish it in October 2025.