Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former

health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical

health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health

question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call, and today I'm speaking with

journalist Beth Macy.

Beth is the author of Dope Sick, dealers, doctors, and the drug company that addicted America, which was made into a mini-series for Hulu.

We talk about the current overdose crisis in America in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and solutions for how to curb the epidemic that's killed over a million people.

We also talk about how this epidemic became personal for me just a few months ago.

Let's listen.

Beth Macy, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call.

So you are the author of Dope Sick, and today we're talking about what I was referring to as the opioid epidemic,

and you were referring to it as the overdose crisis.

So can we talk a little bit about the naming of it and how that changes things?

Sure. When we first started talking about the overdose crisis, it sort of begins with the

introduction of Oxycontin and the big narrative shift that pushed by Purdue and other makers that

opioids were safe. And so that was the first wave of the crisis was really the painkiller

opioid pill epidemic. Then when the pills got hard to get, we talked about the heroin epidemic.

I mean, I basically, when I pitched the proposal for dopesic, I called it the heroin

epidemic. And then that became kind of a fentanyl problem as that became easier to smuggle in because it's

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