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From bank robber to scholar, the Knoxville dropout fighting to change how we see

addiction by Xi Chen, read by Catherine Fenton.

Kirsten Smith was 16 when a boy from school injected her with morphine.

18, when she in a date, Googled had a crush up and inject themselves with oxycodone,

and 19 when she first shot up heroin.

Living in Knoxville, Tennessee, and modeling herself on Pulp Fiction's freewheeling Mia Wallace,

Smith spent her days experimenting with alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy, mushrooms, LSD, and benzodiazepines.

She read Kurt Vonnegut and The Beats

and wrote poems on an actual typewriter

while listening to the Velvet Underground.

For Smith, as for thousands of Americans

who came of age in the early 2000s,

drug use was a seemingly harmless lifestyle choice.

That is, until she ran out of money.

After Smith dropped out of high school and started regularly using heroin,

she was caught stealing credit cards and checkbooks from a boyfriend's wealthy parents,

from a family friend at church, and from her

grandmother. On probation for two years, and forced by her parents into a month-long stay at an

addiction treatment facility, Smith felt for the first time ashamed. Returning to school was supposed to be Smith's lifeline. She went to community college

...