Hi, it’s Al Letson, host of Reveal and More To The Story.
A few years back, we produced one of my all-time favorite projects here at Reveal. It’s called American Rehab. It’s an eight-part series about how the underregulated drug rehab industry in the US often exploits people battling substance abuse. The series focused on how one form of treatment for drug addiction turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce, and it included one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever heard in a podcast. (See: Kandy Latson, episode 2.)
One of the producers and reporters on that project was Shoshana Walter, now a staff writer at The Marshall Project and author of Rehab: An American Scandal, a new book about the rehab industry that has its roots in our series. Sho’s book is all about America’s failed response to the opioid crisis and how treatment in the US too often fuels relapse and overdose rather than recovery. It’s well worth your attention—and so is our conversation on this week’s More To The Story. Sho and I talk about how she started working on this underreported story, the many theories about why overdose rates have finally started falling in America, and the stark racial disparity in how lawmakers have approached the opioid crisis compared with the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Give it a listen wherever you get your podcasts.
—Al Letson
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