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

In 1985, Elliott and Mary Tepper moved their four young sons into San Blas, Madrid’s most notorious heroin slum—ground zero of Europe’s drug epidemic. While other children played soccer, seven-year-old Jonathan was handing out tracts to addicts in syringe-littered parks and befriending bank robbers, former prostitutes, and recovering junkies twice his age.

What began as eight men detoxing in a tiny apartment grew into Betel, now one of the world’s largest drug rehabilitation networks. But Sh...