Journalist Shoshana Walter on telling stories of addiction and recovery

[gentle music] I guess you said this was sort of the beginning of the reporting that eventually leads to your book, Rehab.

What is the timeline for that, and how did you decide this could be a book?

Yeah.

I had an agent at the time, or someone I had been talking to as my agent for a few years by the time these stories came out.

And time to time would check in with him and chat about ideas that he or I had for potential, for something that I could write a book about.

And there just wasn't anything that we had yet discussed that I felt like was really worthy of spending so much time digging into.

One big piece of advice that I got while working on the book, or prior to working on the book, was, you know, don't do it if you're gonna be sick of it in a year or two's time because it's gonna take a really, really long time, and you're gonna be sick of it by the end.

So I just hadn't found anything yet that seemed really worthy of that kind of time investment.

Mm-hmm.

And then, you know, we worked on these stories, and I f- and I felt like there was this bigger story to tell.

The opioid epidemic has brought a lot of changes to the national conversation on addiction, and a lot of positive changes.

You know, when I first started working as a reporter, there was really very little interest in reporting on drugs or people who were addicted to substances.

But over the course of this, you know, initial 10 years of the epidemic, the conversation had really changed.

Now lawmakers were talking about addicted people as having a disease, and a lot of people considered them victims of pharmaceutical companies that had preyed upon them.

Lawmakers were talking about solutions, and one of the biggest solutions that, that lawmakers continually pointed to was this idea of treatment.

And the country did enormously expand our treatment system as a result of this.

But from what I was seeing with all these treatment programs that we were reporting on, it wasn't always working.

In fact, in some ways it made people a lot worse.

And so I saw a much bigger story about the entirety of the system.

You know, what we've been thinking of as the solution to this huge public health problem is maybe not working the way that it should in order to actually help people come out of this crisis.

And so then I began working with my agent on a proposal.

I spent probably a year kind of learning as much as I could about the treatment landscape, what it looks like, what it's composed of, identifying the major problems with it, identifying another character for the book, and then I wrote the proposal in probably about a year or two later I sold the book.

And what year was this? So h- how long ago was the proposal first came together?

I sold the book proposal in 2019, and then COVID hit, and so things kind of, the timeline changed a bit.

I continued at Reveal working on stories related to rehab work camps, and we did this podcast called American Rehab-