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xxii Introduction with the numerous other celebrities not included above, stimulated a great deal of media coverage. Celebrity struggles with prescription drug mis- use, along with the resulting deaths, are certainly newsworthy and have stimulated limited coverage of the wider prescription drug misuse and addiction problem in our current culture. The stories of celebrities who have struggled with prescription drug misuse are not limited to the celeb- rity lifestyle—the stories of death and destruction caused by prescription drug misuse are all too common and increasingly prevalent in families across the United States. Prescription drug misuse affects a wide swath of the American public—the wealthy and the homeless, men and women, doctors and nurses, traditional drug users and respectable middle-class professionals. Nobody is immune from the problem of prescription drug misuse. The following section highlights the stories of ordinary Ameri- cans who have struggled with and even died from this drug use epidemic that is raging across the country. Their stories are dire and tragic, not much different from the stories of celebrities. But the stories from ordi- nary Americans also provide glimpses of hope and recovery. Everyday Struggles with Prescription Drug Misuse and Addiction One of the defining features that fueled the crack scare was the sen- sationalized media focus on crack entering middle-class communities. A 1986 Newsweek article, for instance, claimed that crack “has transformed the ghetto” and “is rapidly spreading into the suburbs.” Other media outlets such as the New York Times and Time featured stories about the crack plague having spread to middle-class Americans and claiming that the crack epidemic had become “universal”—again, without any evidence.39 The prescription drug misuse epidemic was brought to the national spotlight by high-profile celebrity tragedies, much like the crack crisis of the 1980s. But unlike the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the stories of these celebrities who struggled mightily with prescription drug misuse and eventually died, at least in part, from prescription addictions can be told by hundreds of thousands of Americans and their families every year. Newspapers, magazines, and televised news programs have shared many stories of ordinary, often middle-class Americans battling prescription drug misuse over the past two decades. Like the stories from celebrities, the prescription drug misuse stories of ordinary Americans are also dire and often tragic. However, unlike many of the stories from celebrities, whose misuse of prescription medications was largely unknown to the public until it was too late, the stories of ordinary Americans who are