In this hair-raising personal and professional narrative, noted physician Charles LeBaron vividly details the unfolding of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) war on opioid addiction and overdoses.

LeBaron spent 28 years traveling the world as a medical epidemiologist for the CDC. He includes many of these adventures in the narrative, but his overall focus is the opioid epidemic. Through 2006-2012, Purdue Pharma, which promoted OxyContin along with other Big Pharma companies, sold 76 billion opioid doses. Overdoses shot up almost in a parallel manner. In 2022, the death toll from overdoses tallied more than auto and firearms deaths combined. To stem the tide, the CDC decided to focus on a single issue. It set physician guidelines for acute pain opioid prescription.

The author initially was a true believer in this move. Then in 2018 a near-deadly episode of staphylococcal meningitis fused his vertebrae—and left him screaming in pain. Just as he began a slow convalescence thanks to lifesaving antibiotics, the CDC’s guidelines arrived, resulting in curtailed pain relief for many patients. LeBaron’s spinal abscesses and newly contracted shingles required months of high-dose opioids that became increasingly difficult to legally obtain.

Meanwhile, the CDC’s intervention had another deleterious effect: It turbo-charged an epidemic of dangerous fentanyl use as an opioid substitute.

The story is well documented, highlighted by vivid scene-setting, and lightly humorous at times. (Describing CDC workers, the author writes: “We look like we belong in H&R Block, [sic] all we lack are green eyeshades and pocket-protectors and well-sharpened #2 pencils…”) Adventure abounds, as when the author chases pathogens in an underdeveloped country while avoiding possible kidnapping and assassination.

The book is framed by the author’s excruciating personal experience, but he doesn’t skimp on the broader context, explaining the CDC’s “institutional psychology,” which informed its approach.

LeBaron’s narrative often reads like a fictional thriller, but the stakes are all-too-real. Readers will be engrossed in—and sobered by— this opioid tale.

Also available as an ebook.