YouSaid · the spoken record

Beth Macy

lines on the record

68

first

2022-09-29

most recent

2022-09-29

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “You know, she's a little updated on how the kids were doing. And, you know, and then he wrote her back and he had dropped out of high school or junior high. And, you know, his spelling was atrocious. And to see that, like, he was trying to. He was trying to get better. He just didn't have the tools. He didn't have the access.”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I mean, he embarrassed me when he did talk to me. He wasn't very nice. I mean, I think there were years probably that we didn't even talk to each other in the same house. I just viewed him as a non-entity, which is really sad. I mean, my husband is the best dad in the world. And there were moments when the kids were a little old, and I was like, wow, this is what a good dad does. It would just piss me off all over again, you know. I have any of that. I had this amazing uncle who was a former editor of the newspaper that hired me. We just had his celebration of life on Saturday. He was more of a father to me than my own dad ever was. Back then, I mean, that was when the drunk war was really kicking up. There was really no sympathy. And to see that letter that my mom wrote in after she died, you know, so lovely.”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I guess I would have liked to have had some support around that. You know, there's this town of Huntington, West Virginia, which has been just socked by this crisis. They have a recovery-themed high schools now. And if a kid is having a bad day because their parent is addicted and they're struggling, like they can just kind of check themselves out and go talk to people. That would have been a wonderful thing. I didn't know anything. I just thought he was a loser who didn't take care of his family.”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “The more poison drug supply, you know, and they come out and they're opioid naive, and then they get heroin, go back to their old dosage, and now it has fentanyl in it, or it's just all fentanyl. I forget how many times it's many, many more times likely to die when they come out of prison.”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Like dirt when they have gone to the hospital. And the harm reductionists, these are people that do mobile needle exchanges and give out safe use kits, narcan, they begin to build trust. And we know that people that work with them are five times more likely to enter treatment than folks that don't. So I'm really hoping that the settlement monies goes first to the groups on the ground that are doing that as well as to like, you know, the law enforcement in a figures who aren't just putting people in jail because we know that doesn't work. They're just going to come back.”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Yeah, the waiver requires of physicians and nurse practitioners to get aid or 16 hours of training to get a special DEA dispensation. And then they're only allowed to see a certain number of patients until they've been doing it for a couple years. And then still they're capped at 275. So getting this mainstreaming addiction treatment, this MAD act that's currently in the Senate would take that requirement away. And so just like any doctor can prescribe oxycontin, now any doctor, if this passes, will be able to prescribe egopinorphine, which would be a huge thing. And then I think we need to get a lot of money to harm reduction groups that are already on the ground, that are meaning people in 10 encampments and in McDonald's parking lots to get them into systems of care. Because the largest group of people, 40% with OUD, don't want to stop using. They don't trust the systems. They've been treated.”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Well, that's what I was trying to get with Dr. Gupta. I think the first thing is make the MOUD, the medications for opioid use disorder, scale that up. The first thing is to get rid of that waiver requirement, which is, you know, design, it stigmatized drug users all over and the prescriber.”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Big hospital system in the western have Virginia. It's called Carilion. You know, he at the beginning a drug with another drug. It's not his job. And poor Tess had been into his ED numerous times for abscesses and overdoses. And now he got all in one week because a person in power changed his mind, got all of his docs waver, and now when you get somebody like Tesco's in there, they get connected with a peer, they get on buprenorphine, they get connected to an outpatient, counseling. And it's happening and you should hear his voice in the way he's changed. He's not hopeless about it.”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Yeah, and it's much easier for the patient to go get dope than it is to get the treatment much easier. And I was talking to Dr. Gupta, the drug czar on Friday, and he said of the 8%, only about 20% of them even actually prescribe. Like they get waiver and then they don't do it because really they don't want the difficult patients. So hospital systems need to change and, you know, I profile in the new book this and in the finding test podcast. the head of our ed in our”

   2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Well, it's huge. They were lined to, of course, just like the Michael Keaton character was lined to. But what I say when I speak to them a lot in talks and stuff, I'll say, I know not every one of you took a free trip to Arizona or Florida to become paid spokesman for Purdue Pharma, but you participated in a system that now has 7 million people, Americans addicted to opioids. By golly, you ought to participate in the system to get them better. And that's something we could talk about now because there's this mad act up before Congress, which would basically take the waiver requirement off buprenorphine and which we know is the gold standard of treatment. Only 8% of American doctors have bothered to become waiver because they don't want these difficult patients in their waiting room. And that's a real crime.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And get Sentinel or commit suicide. And I hear from a lot of those folks every time I do an interview that they Kind of come out angrily at me and I'm trying to understand that. But the main thing is our doctors haven't been trained how to deal with pain and addiction.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Infiltrate it, you know, the JCO that, you know, the governing body for hospitals that said, unless you treat a person's pain, you might lose your Medicare Medicaid, reimbursements. They changed the whole system by buying, you know, buying people off basically. I mean, at the root, that's what they did. But yeah, and then in 16, the CDC writes a new guideline saying, you know, opioid should be a last ditch effort for moderate pain, very last ditch. So then a lot of doctors overreacted and took stable chronic pain patients who weren't misusing the drug were using more every month. And, you know, a lot of those folks got just yanked off their meds. And then they're, because they're dependent just like Tess was, and they're going to go to the black market.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, opioids and even oxychotin are totally appropriate for cancer, end of lie, post-surgery. But the thing that Purdue did is they said, oh, it's available. It's safe to take long-term for moderate pain. And so then you had kids getting it for wisdom teased surgeries and, you know, back pain and all manner of things. And it wasn't just the narrative around Oxy, it was a narrative around all opioids because.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Communities need this money. They need this $6 billion. So they've set up this site of Sophie's choice between justice and abatement. But unless somebody goes to jail, like what's going to keep another millionaire from wanting to become a billionaire and do the same thing, knowing they could just pay a fine and come out of it. I really hope the DOJ indictes the Sackler. Am I say that?”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Executives who basically took the hit for the Sacklers and were paid richly for it. You know, they doubled down. They hired McKinsey to teach them how to go around the rules that they sent they would abide by. And their best sales year was the year after the settlement. And then so they get them again. The Justice Hartner gets them again for another settlement in 2020. And so that's kind of wrapped up in the bankruptcy. What the hope is because the bankruptcy is currently on appeal, the judge said, the Sacklers and they said the bankruptcy judge doesn't have a right to tell Ed Bish and other parents of the dead that they can't sue the Sacklers, that that's unconstitutional. And now it's at the second circuit court for second appellate level and the next level would be the Supreme Court. So, you know, a lot of the...”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Did they file for bankruptcy? First, they agreed to a $3 billion settlement. Then they filed for bankruptcy to get themselves out of the super wonky, which they love, to get them out of this multi-district litigation in Cleveland. They file for bankruptcy, not in Connecticut where they're based, but in this one jurisdiction in White Plains, New York, because there's one judge, bankruptcy judge, who's known to favor third-party releases, which is the great loophole that they use to be able to retain a large part of their wealth and to wipe out all the 4,000 civil lawsuits against them. It doesn't protect them from criminal suits. So a lot of the parents are still very hopeful that the DOJ will bring justice because they're now recidivist criminals after 07, which is where our show ends, you know, these three examples.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Them at the executives and said, This is your drug, and this is what your drug did to my son. And just very moving. And I was so glad we were able to really put the onus on who the criminals are in the show. And a lot of people read the book. They won an award. It was on the bestseller list, but millions of people watched the show. And some of them reach out to say, you know, I called my addicted son for the first time in three years. And that was really moving because we got to we got to knock the stigma down.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “So good. To see an A-list actor like Michael Keaton and this, he's kind of part Dr. Ridzy and part this doctor I found in Tennessee named Steve Lloyd who actually did get addicted. And then to see him with his social capital, the character, struggle to get on buprenorphine, struggled to get on methadone, and then come back as a guiding force. It's a lot like what Dr. Steve did and also like, you know, Dr. Ben Z. So that was really cool and getting to recreate the scenes like the sentencing hearing in 2007. And that was another thing Lawrence Hammick told me about. He was there that the reporter. He goes, there was this moment I'll never forget. I'm like getting Tierry just telling you, but there's this parent that brought up smuggled her son's ashes into the courtroom that day. And like, you know, way.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “yeah who really was the driving force behind this this lie that oxycon was safe so i thought and i love a battle story so i go back to sister beth a dr manzee other some of the first parents of the dead are a big part of the book and i play that story out and you see that that's the part of the story that really gets the most attention in the hulu show it's the fight against purdue as well as like the michael keaton character he's that's based on a doctor”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Where Richard can't even get West Virginia in Virginia right, you know, it's just like he's so looking down his nose at it. A doctor and nun from Appalachia.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “In her 80s, and she's still counseling every day for 12 hours a day. And you've got to call this doctor, Dr. Art Minzie. He was the first from Lee County, which is the westernmost county in Virginia. You've got to call him because he was the first person to actually pick up the phone to Purdue and say, look, I know it says your drug is virtually non-addictive, but I've got kids I immunized in my practice who are overdosing in the library at high school. I've got farmers who've been, they've had competing opioids before because of injuries, but they get on OxyCon and they lose everything. They lose their truck, their family, their farm, everything. They say that drunk became my God. And they just blew him off as some kook from Appalachia. There's this scene in Danny Strom's Hulu show, the show I worked on basically.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yeah, so the first sort of dopes into the book is I always want to go back just like it did in fact came in. I want to go back to these communities and see how they're doing now. And so I took our former reporter who had covered OxyContin when it first bubbled up as a real problem with crime in the coalfields of Virginia, you know, and across the border in Kentucky and West Virginia. And his name was Lawrence Hammond's. I took him out for coffee when I started working on DopeSick and I said I reread the stories, tell me who you think I should talk to. And he's like, well, you have to go back to this Catholic nun activist who was like took Purdue on in a fire your way. You know, she's like four feet 10.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Yeah, I feel like, especially at the time when the settlement money is coming down, and a lot of communities don't even know what to do with it, I'm worried that it's going to go to Abson. It's only treatment, all the things that veiled tests, incarceration first models. And so it seems like a time for the nation to see like they're outliers.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “That felt like a helper story, you know, Mr. Ronders says, find the helper when you're scared. And so the new book was much easier to write because I was writing about the people that I was one generation removed, you know, from the pain.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Yeah, my blood pressure went way up. I went to my doctor. He thought I had PTSD, sent me to a psychiatrist who said, yeah, it's probably secondary trauma. I work with this group called the DART Society for Trauma Journalists. I've done their programs. And so I knew about it. And then the psychiatrist said, you have probably secondary, but you're just depressed and anxious, you know, and some medication and, you know, also said you should write about some happier things, which I used to be able to do when I was a feature writer. And so anyways, I had to go around talking about the book. My blood pressure came down, stopped that medicine. And then I started hearing about really good things that were happening and innovative things that were happening in the addiction realm and even law enforcement.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “I was at the funeral home when she said goodbye to her battered body, which they had. Know they had done her up so her mom could say goodbye and her granddad, it was just three of us. And that's the last image of the book her mother like. Sing her head and tucking on pictures of her son and her favorite dogs. I think a lock of the dog hair or something she loved her rescue dogs. That was actually how I met her. A friend of mine just found her dogless one day and called me and said, I return this dog to this woman and she didn't know how it was her mother's and had been taken care of the dog and she had to go to work and she didn't know if she could leave her heroin addicted daughter at home alone with her son. She didn't know if she could trust her, take care of her baby son. And that's how I met her.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Yeah, and my husband said, I always want to do that. Like when I needed her to get her material, I would drive her to NA meetings. But when she needed me, my husband said, you can't do that. It could be dangerous. And I didn't do that, but I called her mother and her peer support person instead. But no, we had been texting maybe two weeks before her death about how far she was trying to get home. She had already called ahead to the methadone clinic to sign up. That's another gold standard medicine. She wanted to get custody of her son back. I mean, she was a real like warrior. She was tough, street smart, even though she had grown up with everything handed to her. She really had been on the streets for a long time at that point. And she was like, I'm looking forward to renewing your book. Can I get an early copy? You know, I'm like, I'm rooting for you. And then she's murdered. And it was just like, oh my God, what do you do? What do you do? I just put my notebook down. And I mean, I was at the funeral helping your mother figure out.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “No, she had earlier when she had been on the streets in Roanoke, she had texted me and asked me to pick her up at a trap house.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “In Las Vegas, and when she bombed out of that because she couldn't withstand the cravings without buprenorphy, she was then homeless and doing sex work on the streets of Las Vegas. And she was murdered on Christmas Eve in 2017 and talk about like getting a call. Her mother didn't find out till Christmas Day. I got a call the day after. I think she had just found out that morning actually it took a while to identify her body. And here's her mother crying and every detail that came in that day was worse than the last. Her body's found in a dumpster. Her body had been burned. She was naked. I mean, it was just like, oh my God. And I had already finished the book, but, you know, I had time to rewrite the N. And kind of as a journalist, I'd never been in that situation. And I called a friend of mine who had...”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Observation on the streets. And when the Omsi Cotton got hard to get, her drug dealer showed her how to snort heroin, which is just like how she snorted Otsy, and then or hydrocodone. And then she started injecting when the snorting didn't keep her from being notesick. And she just was somebody that had all kinds of barriers. She couldn't get on MAT. There was a waiting list. It cost $500 for the first visit. Virginia hadn't yet passed Medicaid, you know, one place would only see her if she tried their counseling first and failed would only then let her get on her bupenorphine, which is medication assisted treatment, the gold standard of care, but there's a lot of stigma around it. And so Anna knew she might eventually end up overdosed, but rather instead, as a sort of elastic effort, her grandfather paid her to go to an abstinence-only rehab.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Yes, it was an audible original podcast called Finding Tess. And I met her in 2015. Once I finally got the agent and editor on board with the fact that we were in the middle of this heroin crisis, you know, three years later, I met her and her dad was a surgeon or moment, a hospital nurse. Should have had everything to help her get better and she was just struggling. She just had a baby learned she was pregnant while in jail because she was stealing stuff in order to buy heroin. And I just asked her if I could hang out with her because I knew I'd learn a lot about her. And she told me how she had gotten originally addicted through at an urgent care center by two 30 day prescriptions. Well, it was different opioids, actually. In her case, and then she quickly.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “If you've got X amount of heroin and your dope man isn't coming on next Thursday, you're going to parse it out with a little bit each day until you're going to see him again because the worst thing in the world is to be in withdrawal. It's like the worst flu times 100. You're on the toilet. You're so sick you can't even imagine. And he came to the premiere of the Hulu show, our little independent movie theater in Roanoke. And he's like, I taught you that word.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I was trying to pitch him because I wanted to sell that second book so I could quit my job altogether. And I eventually did, but it wasn't the one I saw happening, which was like, if heroin is in not just Martinsville, Virginia, but it's also in Hidden Valley, which is the cover of Dobesick because it's a beautiful cookie cutter McMansion type neighborhood. Like we got a problem here. And I knew because I remember the prosecutor interviewed who was sending the one kid away to federal prison for five years for his role in his private school classmates dead, that those two kids alone were using and dealing with 50 different kids in that neighborhood. And so it wasn't, it was like, that was just the tip of the iceberg to make the front page the paper. There was this huge iceberg underneath. And I knew it. It wasn't an easy fix. Kids weren't going to just stop using because of this fear of withdrawal. And that first kid I interviewed, the one who was going to prison, taught me the word doping. He said, if you...”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Yeah, it was my gatekeepers in New York. It was both my then agent and my then editor. And I told them both because I had just briefly gone back to the Roanoke Times and I did this three-part series on the fact that heroin was taking over, not the inner city, but the wealthy suburbs and readers kind of spit their copy out. And I was as I was talking, because there's that one year gap between when you turn a book in and when it comes out.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “A good sign, and they point out that in all of Virginia there was no full time education reporter west of Richmond, which is half the state, there was no full-time health reporter, education reporter. It's really dire because we don't even know what we're missing.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Really is, and I don't think we were reporting on ourselves very well either. My next book, I want to write a memoir next, but I want to analyze that decline. And, you know, you go to a small town like where I'm from. I mean, it was never a very big paper, but all that's left is crime and sports. And when you have just crime, I mean, even the Roanoke Times is a lot of crime court because it's easy stuff to get and they're not reimagining for a while. We had a really great website and then we got bought bought by a venture capitalist and all this kind of stuff. They just wanted the building, the downtown building. And there's just nobody telling it other than, you know, there's some nonprofit startups. And I involved in one of them. And that.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “You say your mom's name's Sarah Macy. They're going to want to see her birth certificate practically. Everything is fact-checked. And yet they believe these things that are not fact-checked.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Yeah, it's about the solutions. And it's the median has declined, so nobody's really telling the stories. Then you've got social media coming in and people are only reading things they already agree with, which aren't necessarily right. And my own relatives call the New York Times the fake news. And I'm like. I have written for the New York Times. You would not believe the fact checking. Yeah, I have as well.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, I think they really believed him that he was going to, you know, stop the coal mines closing, stop the bring offshore jobs, bring them back. And he didn't. And he also did a lot of kind of racial dog whistling that appealed to some folks. That's just, you know, which has been going on since the start of our country. And that's just so sad. And yet when you look at their towns and how they have changed and disintegrated, you really do. Go, oh, what the hell Democrats? Like, what did you give these people? You know, in a lot of small towns I report on for raising Lazarus, you know, the media. That's your.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Very bitter. And, you know, a lot of that was done under the Clinton administration and China joining the WTO and just a lot of anger. And one of the first places I went when I was hanging out with that photographer, Jared Sooris, is he took me to a food pantry and they were dispensing the food on what I was like, what is that? It looked like a conveyor belt and it was an old textile mill conveyor belt that they had converted in a food distribution device and I thought that says it all, doesn't it? And you could tell what people used to do by their disfigurements, women who had spent years over sewing machines, making sweatshirts were kind of hunchback and some of the men were missing fingers who had worked.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Yeah, but like a lot of people took like, oh, I'll become a paralegal and there was maybe one paralegal job in that town. And everybody says, why don't they just move to Roanoke or move to a bigger place or move to Greensboro? They don't want to move and they've got family members and kids and elderly relatives that people all over the world where that's happened. People haven't moved. And it was like they had never interviewed a dislocated worker, whoever was running that program. I mean, it was you had to be in school full time to do it. There were all these really onerous things. And how are you going to work even at a gas station and pay your rent if you were going to school full time? It was really crazy. And so.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Yeah, the maker box come targeted and proliferating with pill mills. And so that desperate people are still going to have to survive. And so a lot of people started doctor shopping and using the sales of the pills they were getting because so many people were addicted as a way to pay their other bills. And I want to talk about the TAA, which is super wonky trade and adjustment assistance.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Yeah, I mean, I go into quite a bit of depth in that in factory man. Of course, that's pre trauma that came out in 14. But you saw these communities just really implode. Crime going up and people are blaming the victims basically. These are the same areas where Purdue and other companies.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “you know it'll everybody will benefit but in fact in that in martinsville and bassett in that county you know they had had the highest unemployment rate for a dozen years food stamps tripled disability rates had gone up to 64.1 percent just since china joined the wto and it wasn't a win-win it's i don't know if it's ever going to be a win-win and at the end of my research heroin related crimes started going through the roof And that's when I got the clue that like, oh, this is taken over these small towns”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Superior lines, and people are coming back and they're taking souvenir bricks. And that's what it meant to those people. And the bricks are still warm from the sun. And it reminded me of those people and my mom. And it's this really complex story where nobody ends up mining the back room of this new global store, right? You know, it's always going to be good. It's a win-win.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Absolutely. And when I started interviewing them, it reminded me of when my mom would get laid off and have to pick up under the table jobs, you know, when I was little and a person would give me their cell phone number and they'd be like, oh, it's about to get cut off. Here's my mom's cell phone number instead. And so I tell students that when your own values in your own story sort of intersect what you're trying to write about, that's when I think you're writing most comes a lot. And there's this moment, I don't know if you read Factory Man at the end where I'm taking one last pass through Bassa, Virginia, the town that only existed because of that company and now it's just basically old folks there and no businesses at all. Well, maybe one Bassett industry building in a bank. And this guy is putting a bunch of bricks into a culvert. And the bricks are the bricks from basketball.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “That did my mom's jobs, which she soldered airplane lights. Like, that was then done by machines. And it just employed far fewer people But Brandon was kind of one of those also rural towns. And I think rural places that have more than one industry end up doing better post-globalization. I mean, it's doing okay. It's not like Mortonsville, Virginia, which is the town that inspired factory man. And I really, I was working with this freelance photographer who had been at the paper and he self-assigned himself to document the aftermath of globalization in Martinsville. And we met at a bar and we decided to pair up together. And I got my editor at the paper on board to let us work together, which is very unusual. He was being funded by some journalism foundation at the time. And he had already made a bunch of connections down. There was about an hour away. So we just started going down there to say, what's it like when half of the jobs go away? Not just the textile and the furniture jobs.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Yeah, it was. It was affected like in the earlier round. It got Grimes eventually got bought out by Honeywell, you know, this big international conglomerate. And the people.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Working in journal Yeah, he sure did. He's helped a lot of people too, and he prefers to go to the AA meetings in town that are in the poor neighborhoods. You know, he keeps it real. I run into him from time to time.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Smart as hell, and he will call his mother, it was like the first person who knew that had a car phone and he would call his mother on the way over to her house and say, will you fix me a hamburger? And I just love stories like that. Like that just makes me like really understand that person.”

    2022-09-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 505 — Beth Macy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source