'Dopesick' author, South Jersey activist talk about loss and fighting Big Pharma

The heroes in Beth Macy's latest book are "stone rollers," people who, like the women of Bethany in the biblical story of Lazarus, move heavy rocks while defying custom to raise others from the slow spiritual (and often physical) death of addiction.

Tim Nolan, a nurse practitioner who treats the forgotten and forsaken in rural North Carolina with medical supplies pulled from the back of his Prius. Rev. Michelle Mathis, who runs an outreach with her wife in Mount Airy, North Carolina, a town thought to be the inspiration for Andy Griffith's fictional Mayberry; she describes herself "like the grandma that does syringe exchange and delivers biscuits." Nan Goldin, a renowned photographer whose large-scale pop-up protests have brought attention to the opioid epidemic and shame to the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, reaped billions in profits. Nikki King, an Appalachian native whose youth and take-no-crap attitude were both blessings and curses: She could see her way around obstacles others couldn't, but she was so immersed in her harm reduction efforts she risked burning herself out.

South Jersey's 'stone rollers':What harm reduction looks like here

And Ed Bisch, a Westampton resident who's been fighting against a drug that killed his son longer than Eddie was alive, building a website, organizing protests and showing up for court hearings to bear witness as lawyers tried to hold Purdue and the Sacklers accountable.

They're all fixtures in"Raising Lazarus,'' a follow-up to Macy's 2018 best-seller "Dopesick,'' which was adapted into an Emmy-nominated Hulu series.

Bisch and Macy will appear together at the 20th annual Collingswood Book Festival on Saturday, Oct. 1.

Ed Bisch: From grieving father to anti-opioid activist

Eddie Bisch was just 18 when he died from an opioid overdose. His sister, then 15, found him in their home in Philadelphia's Fishtown neighborhood.

"Eddie was a good kid," Bisch remembered. He met the Courier-Post in a Westampton diner after his overnight IT shift, carrying copies of "Dopesick'' and ''Raising Lazarus'' (he figures prominently in both books) and some of his favorite photographs of his son.

"We called him Mr. Personality when he was little. He would crack jokes," Bisch said. "When he died, it was incomprehensible. Kids don't die. But for me it was also a crash course in a new world — kids weren't dying until (pills) hit the streets."

Bisch learned that a Philadelphia doctor, Richard Paolino, had "flooded the streets" of Philadelphia neighborhoods with OxyContin, selling prescriptions to drug dealers. By the time Eddie Bisch died, Paolino already had lost his medical license (he was eventually sentenced to 30 to 120 years in prison) but the damage was done, the carnage unleashed.

Bisch built a website to track deaths from OxyContin; representatives from Purdue Pharma reached out to him, efforts at damage control. Bisch initially listened as the company downplayed the drug's addictive properties and told him sales and profits were suffering as a result of his efforts. They hired "patient advocates," paying chronic pain sufferers who worried they'd be left without drugs they considered a lifeline.

Opioid lawsuits:Camden County awarded $32 million from J&J, three others in opioid suit

"I am not against pain relievers," Bisch said. "But the lies they tell ... They lied to my face. You don't want to believe a company could be that evil."

Bisch, who's lived in Westampton for seven years, connected with others who'd lost loved ones to opioids, and his work with Relatives Against Purdue Pharma eventually saw him leading protests across the country, raising awareness of the dangers of prescription opioids, heroin and now fentanyl.

"I can't believe I'm here 20 years later," Bisch said. He's immersed himself in reading about addiction, opioids, lawsuits and protests. "It's frustrating and you only get small wins."

Asked how he's dealt with his grief, Bisch shrugged.

"Any parent will tell you, you'll never be as happy as you were before. There's a 'before' and an 'after.' You never get over it, but somehow you learn how to live with it."

Chronicling the opioid epidemic and its fallout

Macy, a longtime newspaper journalist in Roanoke, Virginia, applied a beat reporter's on-the-ground work ethic in both "Dopesick'' and ''Raising Lazarus,'' taking months to gain the trust of sources working in remote areas who in many cases had become wary of outsiders: outreach workers, people in recovery or in active addiction, law enforcement officials, healthcare providers.

'Poison':Fentanyl can be 'a fatal mistake,' warn parents, health care and law enforcement

"Dopesick'' traces the explosion of opioids, from rural communities in Virginia, West Virginia and Maine, and how doctors, patients and health care providers largely were duped into believing OxyContin and other powerful opioids were non-addictive. The book — and the series, which combines fictionalized characters played by Kaitlyn Dever and Michael Keaton with real people like Richard Sackler, played by Michael Stuhlbarg — shows how people who became dependent upon or addicted to prescribed opioids often turned to heroin and later fentanyl for cheaper, more easily obtainable drugs to avoid torturous withdrawal, with many people losing their homes, their jobs, their families, and all too often, their lives.

In "Raising Lazarus,'' Macy picks up the mantle of harm reduction, profiling those "stone rollers" who, she told the Courier-Post, "are totally rolling over the bureaucracy, rolling barriers away, especially in this era of stigma around substance use disorder."

Meeting people where they are:Police, peer recovery specialists team up to help addicted people on Camden streets

"Harm reduction takes a minute," she explained. "You have to get dirty with it."

Macy had to get dirty, too. Even though she's been a local reporter for decades, her work has gained worldwide attention. She had to overcome some of that wariness, and she knows it can be justified. The decline of local newspapers, especially in rural areas, plays a role in the mistrust many feel toward the media.

"Reporters don't go into these rural areas and they can sometimes be snobby about it," she said. "So if I go into a small town in Indiana, I'm seen as Beth Macy, a national writer. That makes it harder to do my work. But you have to get in there and show you've done your homework and build trust."

In chronicling the lives of people struggling with substance use disorder, Macy had to go a step beyond objectivity. She grew close to some of the people she wrote about, taking calls from anguished parents and receiving text messages from a young woman who worked as an escort to support her addiction.

In the encampments:South Jersey homeless encampment is cleared, but its residents' futures are murky

That woman, Tess Henry, was brutally murdered, her body dumped in a trash receptacle in Las Vegas. Macy was gutted.

"I knew there was a strong possibility Tess would die," she recalled. "I never thought she would be murdered. That's a moment as a reporter you never imagine. You put your notebook down and you're a human being."

Bringing stories like Henry's to life, both in print and on a major streaming platform, helped people understand not only the breadth and depth of the crisis, Macy believes, but also helped people understand how difficult it is to overcome opioid addiction.

"When you see an A-list actor like Michael Keaton (portraying someone) struggling, and then becoming a leader (in the recovery community), and putting the blame for this where it should be — not on a loved one who's struggling but on the Sacklers who lied and just kept lying and skirting around the rules ...

"The best comments I heard after the book and the show came out was from a man who said, 'Before I read your book, I just thought I was a (screw)up,' and a woman who told me, 'I saw the show and for the first time in three years, I called my son who's addicted.'"

In the neighborhoods:Homeless encampment in South Camden presents host of challenges

Macy says she's learned from the people she profiled in the book, about addiction, about treatment, about harm reduction (which includes medication assisted treatment, Narcan to reverse overdoses, needle exchanges and fentanyl testing, and treatment for conditions like HIV and hepatitis).

"We've all had to shift our thinking, shift our biases," she said.

Acknowledging the pain addicted people can cause their families, the trauma they create and endure, she added, "These are not criminals or moral failures. These are people with treatable diseases."

Harm reduction:Can fentanyl test strips save lives? Camden County offers another harm reduction tool

Opioid settlements and a 'magic wand'

If much of "Dopesick'' deals with the role pharmaceutical companies, particularly Purdue Pharma, played in sparking the opioid epidemic, "Raising Lazarus'' deals with the fallout for those companies, the efforts to hold them truly accountable for the carnage they wrought, and how to help people who struggle with addiction get well, once and for all.

Macy admitted she lost some of her journalistic objectivity working on both books, but was especially frustrated at the slow pace of change by the end of her work on "Raising Lazarus''.

Interventions:Camden County officials aim to reduce crime. How? By guiding drug addicts to treatment

"It's not a driverless car," Macy said. "Someone committed these crimes."

A friend told her to let that frustration come through her writing.

"The ending of 'Raising Lazarus' is different," she acknowledged. "I take my reporter hat off. This has been going on so long, and I'm pissed off. I didn't do it gracefully at first, but my editor helped me with that."

“The real crisis wasn’t the overdose crisis but the one underlying it and all the other crises in the developed world: it was greed, on an order of magnitude that allows corporations and bought-off politicians and families like the Sacklers to turn Americans against ourselves," she writes in "Raising Lazarus.''

"To persuade us that the ‘junkies’ and Black people and hillbillies and immigrants are why we can’t have nice things.”

There's plenty of blame to go around, Macy said.

"This should be the rare bipartisan issue; it touches Democrats and Republicans alike," she added.

Reporters, she knows, often ask subjects the "magic wand" question: What would solve the problem, in your view?

"The heart of the matter is, (harm reduction and addiction treatment are) really hard work, and we need to reduce the stigma and get these people into systems of care — basic health care, medication assisted treatment, housing, all the things that are needed for folks on the margins. There are low-tech, high-touch ways of reaching this population."

A lot of "Raising Lazarus''is an indictment of the American health care system and the obstacles to care for the most vulnerable: the chronically ill, the mentally ill, the poor, the homeless, people in rural communities.

Holding the Sacklers accountable — financially and criminally — is one of Ed Bisch's most pressing goals, but it's not his only one. He calls the settlements "blood money," and says what he really wants is culpability, for companies like Purdue Pharma to not be able to hide behind byzantine bankruptcy laws, for people like the Sacklers to not be able to hide their money in offshore accounts.

"We don't want an apology," he said. "We know what they did. We want an admission (of guilt). How can they 'admit no wrongdoing'? A million people have died. We want accountability. Someone should be in jail."

He believes the money, especially the settlements and fines paid by pharmaceutical companies, can be used to help people whose lives they devastated. But he worries it might not be.

"States might use it for programs that already exist, but I'm a taxpayer and I'm already paying for this," he said. "No one is talking about how rehab should be free — but with these billions of dollars, it should be with these millions and millions of dollars. When someone is ready, there's a bed for them. Rehabilitation should be free for anyone who wants it."

Phaedra Trethan has been a reporter and editor in South Jersey since 2007 and has covered Camden and surrounding areas since 2015, concentrating on issues relating to quality of life and social justice for the Courier-Post, Burlington County Times and The Daily Journal. She's called South Jersey home since 1971. Contact her with feedback, news tips or questions at ptrethan@gannettnj.com, on Twitter @wordsbyphaedra, or by phone at 856.486-2417.

Help support local journalism with a digital subscription.

REMEMBERING THOSE LOST TO ADDICTION

Gloucester County will hold a candlelight vigil (rain or shine) for those lost to addiction on Tuesday, Aug. 30 at dusk at rain James Atkinson Park; 138 Bethel Mill Rd. Sewell. For more information, visit www.gloucestercountynj.gov or call (856) 384-6929.

Camden County will host its candlelight vigil Wednesday, Aug. 31 at the Remembrance and Hope Memorial at Timber Creek Park in Gloucester Township. For more information, visit www.camdencounty.com/service/mental-health-and-addiction/in-memoriam/

Burlington County's candlelight vigil takes place from 7-9 p.m. Aug. 31 at the Burlington County Amphitheater, 5 Pioneer Blvd., Westampton.

COLLINGSWOOD BOOK FESTIVAL

Beth Macy and Ed Bisch will appear at the Collingswood Book Festival on Oct. 1. For more information, visit www.collingswoodbookfestival.com/

This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Collingsworth Book Festival to have Dopesick author, South Jersey man