As the Covid pandemic grabs headlines, another deadly epidemic is quietly ravaging communities: addiction has led to a record spike in overdoses. Nationally, there was a 29% increase in overdose deaths last year. In Vermont, opioid deaths rose by 38% in 2020, with 157 people who died by overdose.

For town librarian Brett Ann Stanciu, these statistics had a name and a face. In 2016, a local man who broke into her library in Woodbury, Vt., died by suicide after encountering a library trustee. This led Stanciu on a quest to understand opioid addiction in her community and in Vermont. It also led her to reckon with her own addiction. This quest is the subject of her new book, Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal.

Stanciu, a graduate of Marlboro College and formerly the librarian in Woodbury, says that her book “looks at our society and how it’s frayed apart, what the ways [are] that we can put our society back together.”

In our second half, we talk with Maia Szalavitz, a New York Times bestselling author of Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction. Szalavitz. When she was in her 20s, Szalavitz struggled with an addiction to heroin and cocaine. She says programs promoting abstinence from drugs have resulted in broken families, mass incarceration and the spread of disease. Szalavitz says a more effective -- but politically controversial -- approach is harm reduction. Examples of this include needle exchange programs and using methadone and buprenorphine to treat addiction.

Szalavitz says that harm reduction is now gaining acceptance—but for dubious reasons. “Our drug laws are racist. The only reason the drugs that are legal are legal and the drugs that are illegal are illegal is racism and anti-immigrant panic. …Now when we see the victims of the opioid problem as being white, suddenly being nicer to them is OK, so harm reduction gets massively adopted all over the place.”

Szalavitz advocates ending the failed war on drugs and de-stigmatizing substance abuse. “When you take away the elusiveness and the cops and robbers, it doesn’t actually make people want to stay addicted forever. It gives them space to make some change…. Overall the picture is extraordinarily positive.”