America’s Failed Response to the Opioid Crisis with Author Shoshana Walter With Special Guest Host Barbara Kingsolver

Join us for a special conversation between award-winning journalist Shoshana Walter and bestselling and award-winning author Barbara Kingsolver as they chat about Walter's book Rehab: An American Scandal.

In this work, Walter, a Pulitzer finalist, exposes the country's failed response to the opioid crisis and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil that blight the drug rehabilitation industry.

Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before. So why isn't it working? Walter argues that in America—where anyone can get addicted—only certain people get a real chance to recover. Despite record numbers of overdose deaths, the default response is often punishment, while rehabs across the United States fail to incorporate scientifically proven strategies and sometimes exploit patients.

In the book you’ll find the stories of four people who represent failures of the rehab-industrial complex:
- April: a Black mom in Philadelphia who watched 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 who received more opportunities than April, including treatment instead of prison, but was placed in a program that forced unpaid back-breaking labor at for-profit companies.
- Wendy: a mother from a wealthy Los Angeles suburb whose son died in a sober living home; she investigated for-profit treatment programs while law enforcement and regulators routinely ignored warnings.
- Larry: a surgeon who struggled with addiction and became one of the first Suboxone prescribers in the nation, drawing the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Be sure to register now to participate in this urgent conversation and learn insight on how we might fix the system to save lives.

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; she has won the Knight Award for Public Service, the Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. She began her work on the treatment system at The Center for Investigative Reporting, with work that 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 and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In 2023 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.