Generation Rx

May 12, 2014
Journalist Daly begins her investigation of opiate diversion and the echo boom in heroin addiction rates from a place of deep personal pain—her brother’s death. In five “parts,” named for Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, Daly explores her own complicated, back-and-forth memories of her troubled brother’s life and death, interspersed with dispatches from the war on opiates. Daly follows doctors treating overdoses, police tracking down pill mills, and harm reduction workers trying to find new ways to help manage addiction. But these reports are glancing and cover little new ground in the body of reporting. Instead, the bulk of the book is spent in mourning—in support groups for those surviving the death of addicted family members, with her family, and entangled in the reporting she does on other addicts. The book is suffused in sadness, but offers little more than the misery of loss.

June 1, 2014
After her 20-year-old brother, Pat, died from a heroin overdose, Daly gave up her prestigious job as a legal reporter to spend five years looking for an answer to the epidemic spread of addiction among children and young adults.Following Pat's death, the author gained access to his journal and learned more about his path to destruction. Like many young addicts, his downfall began early with marijuana and alcohol. Then, he moved on to prescription pain medications and, eventually, heroin. "[I]n 2011, 4.2 million Americans aged 12 or older reported using heroin at least once in their lives," writes Daly, "and [like Pat], nearly half of the young IV heroin users reported that they abused prescription opioids first." Pain medications are so freely prescribed that they are an easily available, cheap high for teenagers. A few pills per day rapidly escalates to 30 or more, at an unsustainable cost. Addiction follows, and the life of a junkie frequently ends in death within a few years. The rate of recidivism after release from rehabilitation programs is high; even near misses from overdosing and the deaths of friends are insufficient deterrents. As the author learned from her brother's diary, he wasn't having fun, "just partying, being a dumb kid, making bad choices. He was truly an addict." Daly faces the painful realization that she had failed him by deluding herself that he was simply going through a phase. In 2009, the author launched a blog, Oxy Watchdog, which put her in touch with individuals whose lives had been touched by addiction: users and their families, law enforcement officers, social workers and politicians. The author also provides a timeline of "America's Epidemic of Prescription Painkiller and Heroin Abuse," beginning with Bayer's release of heroin as cough suppressant in 1898.This gripping memoir, enhanced by statistics and other stories of addiction, reveals the devastating human cost of failure to face the consequences of the epidemic spread of drug abuse.

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July 1, 2014
More than 16,000 Americans die in a single year from overdoses that include painkilling drugs. Individuals addicted to opiates often move to heroin use for a less expensive but widely accessible high. Generation RX is a harrowing account of the busted lives, splintered relationships, and broken spirits of those who abuse drugs and the people who love these addicts. Journalist Daly divulges the troubled life of her youngest brother, who died from a heroin overdose at age 20. Her narrative oozes guilt, denial, and a sense of failure but mostly loss and unrelenting grief. She writes, There is a rhythm about grief, the way it moves through our bodies like waves; it just keeps coming. Generation RX is sprinkled with other tragic tales, too. In one of them, a funeral-home director cries as he embalms the body of a 22-year-old man who died from a heroin overdose. That corpse is the mortician's own son. Drug abuse claims many young lives. It also ravages the lives of those who care most about the addicts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)