What Came Before the High

What came before the high? Before the fentanyl. Before the heroin. Before the meth. Before the streets, the hustling, the hospitals, the jail stays, the disappearances, and the grief - there was always something first. What Came Before the High is a raw oral-history nonfiction book built from unfiltered interviews with hard-drug users in San Francisco. Told in direct, unsanitized voices, these stories trace the lives behind addiction: childhoods, family damage, first use, survival, love, violence, loss, and the daily reality of staying alive. This is not a book about easy lessons, clean redemption arcs, or outsider analysis. It is a book about people speaking for themselves. Across thirteen interview-based sections, readers move through stories of heroin, fentanyl, meth, crack, cocaine, drug mixing, street survival in the Tenderloin, physical collapse, jail, hospitals, treatment programs, death, and the uncertain question of what comes after. The result is intimate, unsettling, deeply human, and impossible to reduce to stereotype. For readers interested in addiction, urban survival, social reality, and documentary-style nonfiction, What Came Before the High offers a stark, honest portrait of lives usually talked about from a distance.

Pages: 65, Paperback, Independently published