Joining us now is author Jonathan Pepper and his book is Shooting Up, Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love, and Loss.

He grew up as an American missionary kid in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in Spain. He has an

amazing story about what his family went through and as they created a vast network to help people

who are addicted to drugs and then wound up being in the center of the AIDS epidemic. Thank you so much

for joining us today. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Thank you, Jonathan. And, you know, one of the things I like about this, looking at your story, of course, it's a much darker version of an almost sounds trivial to compare it to the Walton's. But what I like is when you got the memoirs of an adult going back and looking at his childhood

and reinterpreting it through the experience that he's had as an adult and talking about

what he saw as a child.

I always liked that kind of a story.

That's one of the things that really drew me to your story.

And of course, also the Christian involvement there, your parents as missionaries.

So they go to Spain as missionaries, and they kind of get drawn into this situation of helping

drug addicts. That wasn't their first priority, was it? What was their original mission when

they went to Spain?

Yes. So my parents moved to Spain in 1983, and my father and mother had worked in Mexico

beforehand for about four years with university students, and they thought they would go to

Spain and do exactly the same thing. So start a church among university students and be a university

chaplain. But they

settled in the neighborhood of San Blas in Madrid. Missionaries tend to be poor. And so I think

they settled there because the rent was cheap, not fully knowing what the neighborhood was like.

And the neighborhood had one of the highest rates of heroin use and juvenile crime in

Europe at the time. And they started helping young men and women and families trying to send

their sons and daughters off to drug rehab centers outside of Madrid because there were almost no centers

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