The nation’s attention has been focused on the COVID-19 pandemic for the past two and a half years. Covid disrupted our lives in so many ways, including isolating us for long periods of time and shutting down much of what we counted on for essentials like food or health.

At the same time, a drug overdose crisis raged. More than 107,000 Americans died of overdoses last year – 15,000 more than the record set in 2020.

Best-selling author Beth Macy’s latest book is Raising Lazarus – Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. The book is WITF and Midtown Scholar’s Pick of the Month in August. Her best-selling book Dopesick was adapted into an Emmy nominated TV series on Hulu.

On Thursday's Smart Talk, Macy described the scope of the drug crisis, "It's massive. It's almost hard to get your arms around. And yet if you just sort of peek behind the surface, if you literally peek under the bridges, you probably drive over. It's right there. It's all around us. It's hovering there, but just barely below ground. And because it's such a hard issue, people don't want to look at it. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make the unseen seen. I'm trying to make it a little more visible. So that will begin, particularly as this opioid litigation settlement moneys is beginning to come down to communities that will know the best ways to to spend it, because we don't want another tobacco settlement where all the money got like waylaid for building potholes and other budget holes that the state budgets were experiencing. We want the money to go to the programs that says best deliver treatment, prevention and harm reduction. We know those things can work if we follow the science.

In writing the book, Macy was right with the people who providing help to drug users in the streets, back roads and homeless encampments of Appalchia. Who are the people she followed? "They're angels that walk on the earth. These are largely harm reductionist and the idea of harm reduction. Most people have heard of needle exchanges. It's this idea of we're going to go to you and we're going to bathe you in nonjudgmental care and we're going to meet you where you are, whether that's in a McDonald's parking lot where the book begins or or under a bridge or in a tent. And because we know that the largest number of people with opioid use disorder are people who say they don't want to stop using drugs. And it's this idea that if we meet them where they are and give them clean needles and test strips, safe use cards, that then we're making a connection because right now the large majority are are totally divorced from all connections with health care. And and the idea is, if you're helping them use more safely, they begin to trust you and then they turn to you for treatment for their hep C or when they're ready to stop using drugs.

"I'm writing about these innovators who are figuring out ways with all these bureaucratic restraints. They're showing creativity and innovation and figuring out ways for people to get out of their silos. Because where people die is this huge gap between treating people as human beings with a treatable medical condition and treating them as moral failures and criminals.

Beth Macy will be appearing at Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg August 24th at 7 p.m.

Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.