The subtitle of “Rehab,” Shoshana Walter’s book about the collective failure in this country regarding widespread drug addiction, says it all: “An American Scandal.”

The Oakland-based Walter examines everything from what she describes as misguided drug laws that long prevented doctors from helping addicts to executives who Walter says profit off the suffering of those addicts and their families.

While Walter provides history and plenty of politics and policy detail, she does it through individual stories: a doctor who bends the rules as he tries to fight the system, a White middle-class young man who gets treatment in lieu of jail time but then learns that the facility — which forces him into hard labor — may be even worse, and a Black woman who gets no such option and is sent to jail.

See Full Page