Generation RX: A Story of Dope, Death, and America’s Opiate Crisis

Journalist Daly begins her investigation of opiate diversion and the echo boom in heroin addiction rates from a place of deep personal pain—her brother’s death. In five “parts,” named for Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, Daly explores her own complicated, back-and-forth memories of her troubled brother’s life and death, interspersed with dispatches from the war on opiates. Daly follows doctors treating overdoses, police tracking down pill mills, and harm reduction workers trying to find new ways to help manage addiction. But these reports are glancing and cover little new ground in the body of reporting. Instead, the bulk of the book is spent in mourning—in support groups for those surviving the death of addicted family members, with her family, and entangled in the reporting she does on other addicts. The book is suffused in sadness, but offers little more than the misery of loss. (Aug.)