xiii Preface Sam Banting was feeling a diff erent kind of “high” on this day. After a very long struggle with opioids, he thought his life was going to turn around. He had been accepted for admission to a well-known treatment center just over 100 miles from his home. He would be starting treatment the next morning and would be on the road to recovery. His wife kissed him goodbye, knowing in her heart that the next time she would see Sam, he would be “clean,” or at least making good progress in that direction. Th e next day she got a phone call from the treatment center. Sam was dead. Th e names are fi ctitious, but the story line is not. In fact, Sam’s tale is not at all that dissimilar from thousands of men and women in the United States whose lives have been, at the least, disrupted and, at worst, brought to an end by the nation’s opioid epidemic. Th e facts used to describe this epidemic are now well known to almost anyone who reads the newspapers or watches news reports on television or the Internet. In 2015 (the last year for which data are available), some 12.5 million Americans mis- used legal prescription opioids. Just over 2 million of those in- dividuals misused prescription opioids for the fi rst time. Of those numbers, 33,091 users died of an opioid overdose, an average of 90 people every day of the year. In the same year, 828,000 individuals used heroin on a regular basis, leading to 12,989 deaths in the year. Overall, the epidemic was thought
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