In DOPESICK, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's 20-plus-year struggle with opioid addiction. Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question --- why her only son died --- and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm.

George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day, a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever. Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars, or in poverty at home?