On the Shelf at CCBC Libraries
Raising Lazarus by Call Number: RC568.O45 M335 2022
Fentanyl, Inc by
A remarkable four-year investigation into the dangerous world of synthetic drugs--from black market drug factories in China to users and dealers on the streets of the U.S. to harm reduction activists in Europe--which reveals for the first time the next wave of the opioid epidemic A deeply human story,Fentanyl, Inc. is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. "A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape," writes Ben Westhoff. "These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs"--and all-too-often tragically lethal. Drugs like fentanyl, K2, and Spice--and those with arcane acronyms like 25i-NBOMe-- were all originally conceived in legitimate laboratories for proper scientific and medicinal purposes. Their formulas were then hijacked and manufactured by rogue chemists, largely in China, who change their molecular structures to stay ahead of the law, making the drugs' effects impossible to predict. Westhoff has infiltrated this shadowy world. He tracks down the little-known scientists who invented these drugs and inadvertently killed thousands, as well as a mysterious drug baron who turned the law upside down in his home country of New Zealand. Westhoff visits the shady factories in China from which these drugs emanate, providing startling and original reporting on how China's vast chemical industry operates, and how the Chinese government subsidizes it. Poignantly, he chronicles the lives of addicted users and dealers, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground drug awareness organizers in the U.S. and Europe. Together they represent the shocking and riveting full anatomy of a calamity we are just beginning to understand. From its depths, as Westhoff relates, are emerging new strategies that may provide essential long-term solutions to the drug crisis that has affected so many.
Call Number: RC568.O45 W37 2019
Pain Killer by
Between 1999 and 2017, an estimated 250,000 Americans died from overdoses involving prescription painkillers, a plague ignited by the aggressive marketing of OxyContin by its maker, Purdue Pharma. Purdue, owned by a wealthy and secretive family--the Sacklers--knew early on that teenagers and others were abusing its billion dollar "wonder" drug. But Justice Department officials balked a decade ago when it came to meting out justice, allowing an opioid crisis to evolve into a catastrophe. Originally published in 2003 and hailed since as groundbreaking, Meier--in this thoroughly updated edition--reveals new and shocking information about how long the drug maker knew about OxyContin's abuse, even as it marketed it aggressively, and the way government officials passed up opportunities to protect hundreds of thousands of lives. Equal parts crime thriller, medical detective story, and business expose, Pain Killer is the origin story of the opioid crisis, a hard-hitting look at how a supposed wonder drug became the gateway drug to a national tragedy.
Call Number: HV5822.O99 M45 2018
OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose by
The history of an unnatural disaster-drug overdose-and the emergence of naloxone as a social and technological solution.For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys-an ugly death awaiting social deviants-neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD, Nancy Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned-and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and "reversal" after an overdose possible, became a tool for shifting law, policy, clinical medicine, and science toward harm reduction. Liberated from emergency room protocols and distributed in take-home kits to non-medical professionals, it also became a tool of empowerment. After recounting the prehistory of naloxone-the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of "reanimatology"-Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists-whom she calls the "protagonists" of her story-Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster.
Call Number: RC566 .C36 2020
Encyclopedia of Substance Abuse Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery by Call Number: RC563.4 .E53 2009
CDC Data
- CDC Data OverviewMore than 932,000 people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.1 Nearly 75% of drug overdose deaths in 2020 involved an opioid.2 Opioids are substances that work in the nervous system of the body or in specific receptors in the brain to reduce the intensity of pain.
Online from CCBC Libraries
Encyclopedia of Substance Abuse (2 Volume Set) by Call Number: eBook HV4998 .E53 2011ISBN: 9781536117738Publication Date: 2020-02-14
