BAD MEDICINE

As America’s opioid epidemic gathered pace in the early 2010s, a rookie New York prosecutor went after a physician who sometimes wrote 100 prescriptions a day. Here she tells the story.

“There is no greater misfortune than greed,” observed the judge, quoting Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. Bismuth’s lively account of the four-year investigation and trial of Dr. Stan Li—a rogue anesthesiologist who ran a basement pain-management clinic on the weekends—shows the grim human cost of that greed. The author reveals opioid giant Purdue Pharma’s “relentless, misleading, and highly effective” marketing campaign and provides chilling details of the raging epidemic their efforts helped fuel. Between 2007 and 2010, opiate prescriptions jumped 100%. “By 2016,” writes Bismuth, “more than sixty-three thousand human lives would be lost from drug overdoses alone, and...more than forty thousand of those deaths would involve at least one opioid.” As we join the investigation of Li, ultimately tried on 211 counts, including two of homicide, we meet a cast of memorable individuals, from witnesses to addicts to bereaved relatives. These include Margaret Rappold, whose son overdosed at age 21; addict Dawn Tamasi, whose parents begged Dr. Li to stop prescribing after he had given her eight separate drugs; David Laffer, another Li patient, who shot four people as he stole 11,000 pills from a pharmacy; Eddie Valora, the tipster who first alerted the police; and Jean Stone, a Medicare fraud expert who also writes a fashion blog. The narrative jumps backward and forward too often between the investigation and the trial, which can be confusing in certain sections, and the tossed-off title of the book does no service to this vivid first-person narrative. But the author, an attorney, is skilled in her depictions of the courtroom scenes—notably the complex jousting of the expert witnesses.

A gripping read tailor-made for the silver screen.