The opioid epidemic has changed us -
and one thing is certain: stigma kills.
The Minnesota Opioid Project is an oral history project created by Amy C. Sullivan, PhD. The fifty-plus narrators were interviewed between 2016-2019. Twenty-six of those interviews were featured in Opioid Reckoning: Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Rehab State (2021). The collection includes the oral histories of a wide range of people: those who have experienced an opioid use disorder, parents and loved ones, physicians, social workers, treatment specialists, and harm reductionists, all of whom shared profound lived experiences and insights.
Their stories add depth and complexity to the history of drug treatment, addiction medicine, and harm reduction in Minnesota, the birthplace of alcohol and drug treatment. The heavy-lift of this project is to help end stigma by adding perspective, depth, and humanity to a problem that has for too long blamed individuals for their addictions.
The interviews are in the process of being archived at the University of Minnesota’s Social Welfare History Archives.
If you would like to have access to them before they are available there, please contact Amy Sullivan using the Contact page.
Opioid Reckoning: Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Rehab State is the book that emerged from Sullivan’s collection of interviews. It takes an empathetic but agnostic approach to drug use, parenting, treatment, recovery, medication, AA, abstinence and moral judgements about drug users. The swift death an opioid overdose can cause has provoked a reckoning at every level of society–across all sectors and communities.
This book offers readers a chance to think hard about stigma, question treatment models and the healthcare system, while also imagining a future where anyone experiencing an opioid use disorder can get the right kind of help they need for as long as they need it.
Available at your local bookstore, or through University of Minnesota Press, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.