From the labs and marketing departments of big pharma to local doctor's offices wealthy suburbs to distressed small communities in Central Appalachia from distant cities to once-idyllic farm towns the spread of opioid addiction follows a tortuous trajectory that illustrates how this crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched.īeginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother's question-why her only son died-and comes away with a gripping, unputdownable story of greed and need. I don’t know if there is going to be a season two but I would love for there to be.”Ĭopyright 2022 by WSLS 10 - All rights reserved.In this extraordinary work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of a national drama that has unfolded over two decades.

Macy is currently working on her fourth book, “Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis,” which is set to come out in August.Īs for a second season of Dopesick, she says: “There’s more story to tell. “Danny took 20 years of story and compressed it into eight hours of television in a way that was entertaining but also got a story with so many different phalanges. Macy credits showrunner, Danny Strong, with the show’s unique format taking viewers through different time periods. Macy worked as one of the executive producers and co-writers to help get her book adapted for the screen. “Michael Keaton worked his tail off to get that character right and he has personally lost a relative to an opioid overdose, so this was a passion project for him too,” said Macy. The Hulu mini-series is nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Critics Choice Awards and this week, won a Golden Globe for Michael Keaton’s character. “And this was my second hope for the show was to give an important message about treatments which would be to not to stigmatize those taking medication-assisted treatment.” “My two things going in were one, I didn’t want Hollywood to stereotype Appalachia and it didn’t,” she said. The show tells the story of those involved in America’s opioid epidemic. Some parts of the show were even filmed in Clifton Forge. – The Hulu show “Dopesick,” which premiered in October, is based on the book by local author and former Roanoke Times reporter, Beth Macy.

Dopesick based book