Fact-Finding Mission: Opioid-crisis audiobooks
the true crime that's worth your time
Welcome to a new recurring feature on Best Evidence, a variation on my old Ask The Readers column on Tomato Nation. Need help finding a book or article, but don’t have many details? Got a long car trip coming up, like today’s correspondent, and want some recs? Send us an email (editorial at bestevidence dot fyi), @ us on Twitter, or call/text 919-75-CRIME and we’ll put your fellow readers/true-crime consumers on the case. — SDB
“Hey, Best Evidencers. Yesterday’s item on Taylor Kitsch and Painkiller made me realize that I have zero grounding in the topic of the opioid crisis. I’d like to change that, but it seems like most of the best properties are (…long) books and I don’t know if I have the time. I DO have a 1000-mile drive coming up in August, though, so maybe the group could recommend a couple of audiobooks on the topic? Abridged is fine. — D”
I was hoping that Patrick Radden Keefe article would have an audio version, as many NYer pieces do now, but it doesn’t. You’ll have to tackle the full-length book, Empire of Pain, and while I haven’t read or listened to it, it’s hard to go wrong with Radden Keefe, and he narrates it himself, which is often a value-add IME. (Disclosure: if you grab any audiobooks through Exhibit B.’s Libro.fm account, even ones not on my “playlists,” I get a small percentage.)
I can recommend Gerald Posner’s Pharma, which I’m listening to right now and which is narrated by the great Jacques Roy, who really gets some low pH on the phrase “end footnote.” And I can vouch for the text version of Dopesick, so you might try that audiobook as well.
A short list of other books that are a bit more granular in their case approach, but that I haven’t sampled yet, would include
American Overdose
Death In Mud Lick
Dreamland
The Least Of Us
Readers, what rec ye? Any of these you’ve tried and think D should in fact avoid? Alts or listenable magazine articles I missed?