Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction

George Stephanopoulos, Good Morning America and ABC Sunday News In the shadows of Madrid's most notorious drug slum, an American missionary family plants roots among heroin addicts and builds an unlikely church. Shooting Up is Jonathan Tepper's searing memoir of a childhood spent in San Blas, where syringes littered playgrounds and his closest friends were recovering junkies twice his age. When Elliott and Mary Tepper arrive in 1985 with their four young sons, San Blas is ground zero of Europe's heroin epidemic. While other children play soccer, Jonathan befriends bank robbers and former prostitutes. His heroes aren't athletes but men like Raúl and Jambri, charismatic ex-addicts who transform their lives through the revolutionary drug rehabilitation center the Teppers help found. What begins as eight men in an apartment becomes Betel, now one of the world's largest drug rehabilitation networks. But this isn't a story of institutional triumph.