American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts Audiobook (Free)

A comprehensive portrait of the uniquely American epidemic–devastating in its findings and damning in its conclusions

The opioid epidemic continues to be described as ‘one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine.’ But phoning it a blunder is a nice rewriting of the history of greed, corruption, and indifference that forced the united states into consuming more than 80 percent of the world’s opioid painkillers.

Journeying through lives and communities wrecked by the epidemic, Chris McGreal reveals not merely about American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts how Big Pharma hooked Americans on powerfully addictive drugs, but the corrupting of drugs and public institutions that let the opioid makers escape with it.

The starting place for McGreal’s deeply reported investigation may be the miners promised that opioid painkillers would restore their wrecked bodies, but who became targets of ‘medication dealers in white coats.’

Several heroic physicians warned of impending disaster. But American Overdose exposes the powerful forces they were up against, including the pharmaceutical industry’s coopting of the Food and Medication Administration and Congress in the drive to force painkillers–resulting in the resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland. McGreal tells the story, in conditions both wide and intimate, of people hit with a catastrophe they under no circumstances saw arriving. Years in the producing, its ruinous implications will extend years in to the future.