4w 2 Victor Villas
Overdose [图书] 谷歌图书
作者: Benjamin Perrin Penguin Canada 2022 - 01
NATIONAL BESTSELLER

SHORTLISTED for the 2021 BC Book Awards' George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature

SHORTLISTED for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes, for both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes

SHORTLISTED for the 2021 J. W. Dafoe Book Prize

SHORTLISTED for the 2020 Lane Anderson Award

“Overdose is a necessary and searching investigation into a devastating epidemic that should never have happened. Benjamin Perrin painstakingly shows that it need not continue if we, as a society, heed the evidence.”
—Gabor Maté M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction

An astonishing and powerful look at the ongoing opioid crisis

North America is in the middle of a health emergency. Life expectancies are declining. Someone is dying every two hours in Canada from illicit drug overdose. Fentanyl has become a looming presence—an opioid more powerful, pervasive, and deadly than any previous street drug.

The victims are many—and often not whom we might expect. They include the poor and forgotten but also our neighbours: professionals, students, and parents. Despite the thousands of deaths, these victims have remained largely invisible.

But not anymore. Benjamin Perrin, a law and policy expert, shines a light in this darkest of corners—and his findings challenge many assumptions about the crisis. Why do people use drugs despite the risk of overdosing? Can we crack down on the fentanyl supply? Do supervised consumption sites and providing “safe drugs” enable the problem? Which treatments work? Would decriminalizing all drugs help or do further harm?

In this urgent and humane look at a devastating epidemic, Perrin draws on behind-the-scenes interviews with those on the frontlines, including undercover police officers, intelligence analysts, border agents, prosecutors, healthcare professionals, Indigenous organizations, activists, and people who use drugs. Not only does he unveil the many complexities of this situation, but he also offers a new way forward—one that may save thousands of lives.

finished reading Overdose 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗
Honest, well research and comprehensive. This book is almost the perfect material to get introduced to an evidence-based approach to "the war on drugs". That it was written by someone who was entirely embedded in conservative politics and grows a devout christian adds to the appeal to its universality.

The one flaw of the book, if it can even be called a fault instead of perhaps a missed opportunity, is the little discussion of the infertile grounds to sow the thesis, because this is one of the most important things we need right now to move forward with solutions. The current political climate is that of conservative leaders calling "empathy" weakness. A good chunk of the book is dedicated to dismantling the stigma, but this bias is a foundational character aspect of at least a third of us: rugged individualism cannot be argued out of someone's core values and principles. How do we even get people to read this book cover to cover without triggering "culture war" reflexes of dismissal? I have no idea, and I guess it's a different type of book that needs to address this.