Cherry Picking Orange Bottles in Appalachia: Reading Through the Opioid Epidemic

I spent the second half of high school and a majority of college absolutely entranced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, watching all the movies as they interconnected and revealed things about each other - a more complete story coming into play with every theatrical release; all coming to a head in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame. I loved how all the puzzle pieces fit together, the timeline of events, the exposure of what was happening here while those events were happening there. It felt like I was constantly learning through the world-building that was happening.

The same year that the finale of the Infinite Saga was released, I checked out a booked titled Cherry, by Nico Walker, from the TCU library. I heard about it through the grapevine of the social media, as the directors of the Avengers movies had picked it up to adapt into a movie for Apple TV+, starring none other than Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland. The premise I was given online read along the lines of “Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient returns from overseas with PTSD, is prescribed opioids, and eventually begins robbing banks to fund heroin addiction.” Which, honestly, really does give a fantastic one-line summary to the events of the semi-autobiographical debut novel of the author, written during his time in prison. I used the book as a source and a prop throughout my 12-minute persuasive speech on the opioid epidemic my senior year, calling out quotes about the ease of getting addicted and how it escalated for Walker.

Six years later, I think about that book and that speech a lot. Not because the movie turned out to be any good (it did not, I wrote a whole blog post about it), but because I found that as I continue to read, I’ve created a literary universe of novels on my bookshelf that take place in the real world and captivate the stories of what has really been happening with the opioid crisis.

Cherry is a good read, and it’s an introduction to how someone who already wasn’t making good decisions could fall down the rabbit hole of addiction and crime pretty quickly. It highlighted the issue of over-prescribing veterans with opioid medication for PTSD diagnoses, and the failure on the American medical system to protect those who have served our country. But Walker, as the author, doesn’t have a positive view of himself, so then narrative presents a main character who, from the start, isn’t someone you feel compelled to root for or like. And with that, any messaging about the predatory actions of the pharmaceutical companies and medical prescribers is downplayed and overshadowed.

Recommending Cherry by Nico Walker (2018)

I would recommend Cherry to readers who are comfortable reading about difficult protagonists who make poor decisions, but also fall victim to the circumstances they live in. There is a general focus in this book on how one may go from serving in the Army to robbing banks for heroin money, but it is also a very narrative-driven story, rather than plot-driven. This is a semi-autobiographical novel, and its the debut work of the author, so those are things to keep in mind before picking it up. It’s less about the prose and more about learning who the person is behind the pen. But overall, a very insightful read.

A few years later, in 2024, I read two books that take a look at pharmaceutical companies and federal investigations: first, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives by Jesse Eisinger, which briefly touches on pharmaceutical companies as an area of corporate crime that is not prosecuted to the fullest extent; and second, Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice by David Enrich, which discusses how Jones Day represented manufacturers like Purdue Pharma and helped shield distributors, such as Walmart pharmacies, taking up roles in the Trump administration and setting up culprits to evade full culpability for their heavy and wanton participation in the over-prescription of opioid medication.

Recommending The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives by Jesse Eisinger (2017)

This book is fast-paced in discussing how, after Enron and Arthur Anderson, the Department of Justice generally gave up on prosecuting corporate executives, especially in the face of the 2008 housing crisis. A fascinating read, but it requires a lot of understanding of accounting, finance, and the types of white collar crimes that these corporations are committing and the work that the Big 4 Accounting firms have done to both cover it up and expel notions of executive responsibility. A must-read if you are wanting to practice law in the area of White Collar Crime, want to be a federal prosecutor, or if you work at a public accounting firm.

Recommending Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice by David Enrich (2022)

Highly recommend this to any lawyers or law students looking to go into Big Law, especially now, three years after the publication of this book. It’s a detailed history behind Jones Day, and firms like it as they transformed from law practices to businesses. It’s an incredibly eye-opening book that doesn’t require readers to have extensive legal backgrounds, and it showcases how the legal practice bleeds into bureaucracy. This book does make you feel like lawyers are terrible people. As one, it’s not a great feeling.

Then, in September 2025, I read Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, which takes place over the course of a century, documenting how the Sackler family developed aggressive medical advertising practices, and eventually all the decisions made in developing and pushing OxyContin into the hands of patients across the world. Addiction is the background, while business practices and “blood money” are the focus of the book. The paramount point highlighted is that the Sackler family and the executives at Purdue Pharma failed to properly test OxyContin for addictive properties, falsely marketed the drug, potentially bribed the FDA for approval, and continued to supply prescriptions to doctors and pharmacies that were clearly nothing but pill mills. They targeted vulnerable communities for the sake of “curing pain,” which only amounted to a path of destruction in its wake.

Recommending Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (2021)

Highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the behind-the-scenes actions, history, and decisions that brought OxyContin to the prescription market. There is so much to this book, and it highlights a family that seems be forever unsatisfied with what they’ve built - always pushing for more business, more money, more prestige. A truly phenomenal nonfiction work that takes you through time to see how all the dominoes lined up, just to be knocked down on the American people.

This brought me to Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver in November 2025. Taking up the actual stories of destruction that Empire of Pain could only mention in brief, the fictional novel that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize is a narrative piece of a young boy growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of Western Virginia among the outcasts of American Society. The story is so much more than a portrayal of addiction, but Kingsolver wrote it with inspiration from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, giving a full view of what life looks like when addiction is present, and how the most vulnerable of our society sometimes don’t stand a chance against the powers that be. Death becomes a prominent character in Lee County, and Kingsolver uses her protagonist as a worthy placeholder for all the true stories of addiction at the hands of OxyContin and Purdue Pharma. I’ll admit, I wasn’t too keen on reading the book, but by the time I got 50 pages in, I knew it was going to be one of the most impactful stories I’ve ever read. And I don’t know why I’m surprised by that, it literally had the Pulitzer Prize winner sticker on the cover.

Recommending Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)

This is truly a beautiful novel that transports you into a different world sitting at the heart of the mountains on the Eastern Seaboard. It’s narrative-driven like Cherry, but it is so encapsulating of what it means to be human, what it means to lose and to suffer, and it brings hope that there are people out there who will be guiding lights through the terrible times. It’s easy in language but hard in themes, and in the end, if you really look for it, hidden beneath the struggle is the reminder that we will come across people in our lives who will always be champions of good and who encompass the magic of the human spirit.

These books, mainly Cherry, Empire of Pain, and Demon Copperhead, all came together in my mind to paint a clearer picture of what really led to and has been happening as this crisis continues to unfold. And I felt encouraged to write about connecting these novels together because reading for the sake of learning can be a process. Empire of Pain has its focus on the actors rather than the afflicted, so it wouldn’t fit the narrative of the work to include in-depth perspectives of those suffering from addiction. Cherry and Demon Copperhead offer two very different perspectives of individuals who fell victim to the crisis, and the different trajectories of their lives. These were all phenomenal books, but they cannot realistically take on telling the whole story And surely there will be more to come. Other forms of art, such as TV shows like Dopesick and movies like Pain Hustlers, on top of all the documentaries that have come out on the subject, continue to introduce narratives to this crisis and help better encapsulate all the different areas of action and impact.

There are more stories to build this literary universe. Instead of world-building like the MCU, it is world-defining, showcasing the very events happening around us that we may be blind to. And as more stories come to newspapers, published pages, and screens, the better understanding we will have about what is going on, who is affected, and how we can help the world recover. If you are looking to dive into learning more about the opioid crisis, I cannot recommend enough taking up these three books (Cherry, Empire of Pain, and Demon Copperhead) to start you on the journey of understanding.