Treating America's Opioid Addiction Part 3: Searching for Meaning in Kensington

“We should never, ever forget that addiction treatment is a search for meaning in a place other than using drugs.”

—Nancy Campbell, historian of drug addiction

(This is the third and final chapter of a three-part series. See Part 1 and Part 2.)

In the final chapter of this series we travel to the heart of our modern opioid crisis. In what is now a notorious Philadelphia neighborhood called Kensington, we meet two victims of the epidemic and follow them on two distinct paths toward recovery.

Our current devastating opioid crisis is unprecedented in its reach and deadliness, but it’s not the first such epidemic the United States has experienced or tried to treat. In fact, it’s the third. 

Treating America’s Opioid Addiction is a three-part series that investigates how we’ve understood and treated opioid addiction over more than a century. Through the years we’ve categorized opioid addiction as some combination of a moral failure, a mental illness, a biological disease, or a crime. And though we’ve desperately wanted the problem to be something science alone can solve, the more we look, the more complicated we learn it is. 

Credits

Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Reporters: Mariel Carr and Rigoberto Hernandez, with additional reporting by Meir Rinde
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Audio Engineer: James Morrison 
Photo illustration by Jay Muhlin
Additional audio production by Dan Drago

Music

Music courtesy of the Audio Network. 

Research Notes

Interviews:

Claire Clark, author of The Recovery Revolution: The Battle over Addiction Treatment in the United States. 
Nancy Campbell, historian and director of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Chris Marshall, former member and director of the Last Stop.
Miranda Thomas, Kensington resident.
Joseph Garbely, vice president of medical services and medical director of the Caron Treatment Centers.
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