From the Editors
“THE FACT THAT HE’S STILL ALIVE MEANS THAT THERE’S HOPE,” SAYS KRISTINA BARBOZA from her living room in East Wareham, Mass., 50 miles and a world away from where her 31-year-old son Billy sleeps beneath a Boston overpass. In Huntington, W.Va., firefighter Larry Kishbaugh—haunted by the countless overdose scenes he has rushed to—has been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. Inside a holding cell at the Kenton County, Kentucky, detention center where drug users are left to detox, 29-year-old mother Kayla Rauck wonders if she’ll ever see her children again.
It is hard to fathom, and bitterly ironic: the depth of the suffering caused by drugs whose ostensible purpose is to alleviate pain. Statistics offer a partial view of the wreckage. In 2016 alone, nearly 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses—roughly as many as were lost in the entire Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. The U.S. is the world’s richest country, and yet its life expectancy declined in both 2015 and 2016. More than 122 people die every
