OPIUM EATER

A wrenching, thought-provoking, and insightful tour through drugs, suffering, public policy, and the search for meaning in the New Age of Opioids

OPIUM EATER is a compelling, unabashedly literary work about a most topical yet timeless of subjects: the use and abuse of opioids. The book combines several complementary approaches to its subject: a lyrical memoir about pain and opioid painkillers; a compassionate report on substance use, addiction, overdose, and the War on Drugs policy in North America and around the world; an immersion in the experience of pain, and the failings of systems to treat it; a provocative call for radically different drug policy; a rigorous look at the science of both pain and addiction from the molecular to the philosophical; and a lush colourful history of opioid use that takes readers through a Who's Who of laudanum-quaffing, opium-smoking Romantics.

Carlyn Zwarenstein is a freelance journalist based in Toronto who writes about substance use and drug policy, mental health, inequality and the social determinants of health, as well as literature, travel, and social movements. She has written for the Guardian, the Washington Post, and has published poetry.