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Online Author Talk With Shoshana Walter

America’s Failed Response to the Opioid Crisis

Join us online for a special conversation between award-winning journalist Shoshana Walter and bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver as they chat about Walter’s book "Rehab: An American Scandal." Adults. Register to get a link. A recording will also be available for later viewing.

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Join us online for a special conversation between award-winning journalist Shoshana Walter and bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver as they chat about Walter’s book "Rehab: An American Scandal." In this work, Walter, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis and the malfeasance, corruption and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry.

Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before, but only certain people get a real chance to recover. Despite record numbers of overdose deaths in the United States, the default response is still to punish, while rehabs across the country fail to incorporate scientifically proven strategies and exploit patients.

In this book, you’ll find the stories of four people who represent the failures of the rehab-industrial complex, and the ways our treatment system often prevents recovery. April is a Black mom in Philadelphia, who witnessed firsthand how the government’s punitive response to the crack epidemic impeded her mother’s recovery and then her own. Chris, a young middle-class white man from Louisiana, received more opportunities in his addiction than April, including the chance to go to treatment instead of prison. Yet the only program the judge permitted was one that forced him to perform unpaid back-breaking labor at for-profit companies. Wendy is a mother from a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, whose son died in a sober living home. She began investigating for-profit treatment programs, but law enforcement and regulators routinely ignored her warnings, allowing rehab patients to die, again and again. Larry is a surgeon who himself struggled with addiction, and would eventually become one of the first Suboxone prescribers in the nation, drawing the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Register to participate in this urgent conversation on how we might fix the system to save lives.

Adults. Register to receive a link for viewing this online event.

About the Author: Shoshana Walter is a reporter for the Marshall Project covering the criminal justice system. Her reporting has been honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Selden Ring, and she has won the Knight Award for Public Service, the Edward R. Murrow Award and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. She started her work on the treatment system at The Center for Investigative Reporting, where her work appeared in The New York Times Magazine, in newspapers, and on NPR stations across the country. She is based in Oakland, California.

About the Guest Host: Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist and poet. Her widely known works include "The Poisonwood Bible," the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel "Demon Copperhead." Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.

This event is part of DBRL's Online Author Series, supported by David Lile honorarium funds. A recording will also be available for later viewing on the author series site.

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