Knowledge to Action?: Evidence-Based Health Care in Context Book

Meth: America's Drug Epidemic
By Elaine Landue
Review

For our non- fiction unit, I read Meth: America's Drug Epidemic by Elaine Landue. This book was filled with many facts and stories of real life drug users. In some ways I really enjoyed this book. I usually wouldn't read or enjoy non-fiction, but in this case I really liked it. This book didn't really feel like it was non-fiction because of the stories. There are many stories of people ages 4-70 that were either drug users or lived in a drug household. These stories were so unbelievable and crazy that it seemed fiction. I really got to get a closer look of how these drug users lived or even died. For example, in the book there was a story of a four-year-old little girl who lived in her parent's Meth lab since she was born. Since she was born her parents never really cared about her. They where usually asleep for days at a time and she would hardly get any food. When her parents where awake they would usually beat her. I really felt bad for her through out the entire book.


There are many things that I learned in this book. One was that Meth is an addiction that is illegal. Once you take it is hard to stop. This is an issue because it has become an epidemic and many people of all ages are using it. It can kill your self or others near you. When on drugs your brain cant function correctly so you could go crazy and kill anyone. Us Government stats say more then 12,000,000 Americans have tried Meth. The book explains that once you start using it you cant to back to the person you were. What this means is that when on drugs you act differently then you usually would, but even when you stop taking it your brain is changed forever.

This book proved that non-fiction could be interesting, yet a pleasure to read. The entire time I was reading it I couldn't put it down. In some ways it was also kind of scary to see pictures of drug users. Something that I realized was that these photos really helped me picture the life of a drug user. Some other things that the author used to help the reader were captions and text boxes. These tools really helped me imagine the scene. Over all, the layout of this book was very helpful.

I would recommend this book to any one who would want to go in depth with the topic of drug like Meth. Compared to other non-fiction books I felt that this was one of the best ones I have ever read. I would honestly give this book 5/5 star. I would not recommend this book to anyone who will get scared of the thought of drugs and death stories. Over all, this book was amazing. I would definitely read more books from this author in the future. Some questions I still have about the topic are: How many times do you have to take drugs to become addicted to it? and what parts of your body are affected when on drugs?