“A beautifully written meditation on opioids, addiction, joy, and pain — and the cruel and rigid policies we devise that mainly serve to make suffering worse.”

Maia Szalavitz, author of Undoing Drugs

“Carlyn Zwarenstein provides a voice previously missing from the overdose crisis. With empathy and urgency, she takes us inside the world of people who use opioids at a time when they are dying in record numbers. On Opium captures people’s pain, hope, and resilience, and in sharing their stories, provides a blueprint to end the crisis.”

Travis Lupick, author of Fighting for Space

“On Opium is a thoughtful and rigorous, often genre-bending mixture of personal essay, journalism, and literary meditation on the “scope of a life” coping with pain . It’s also an examination of pain as a medical and public health emergency that has major societal implications […] I’m glad someone took Zwarenstein’s book from my table. I hope it landed in the hands of someone who needed it, because many of us do.
Herizons, Summer 2023

“Zwarenstein has a very special and specific writing style. At times, it’s intoxicating. I felt swept into her world, whether on a trip to Venice or at a supervised injection facility … the urgency in this book is transcendent.”
Briarpatch

“Captivating, rage-inducing, and most important of all, helpful… I found this revelatory… CBC  Books listed this as one of the fall’s must-read nonfiction books, and I agree… its compassion, accessibility, readability, radical proposal, and examination of privilege will leave you the tools to demand better.”
         the Miramichi Reader 

         “Rarely have I felt so trusted as a reader.”
                   Literary Review of Canada

“No one who wants to understand non-medical use of drugs in this society should fail to read this book… Part memoir, part history of the lures of opium across the ages, part deep reflection about what it is to be a writer, part meditation on the meaning of pain, part plea for reform, the book takes readers by the hand and leads them gently (but firmly) on… It’s possible to disagree with parts of this book. It’s impossible not to recognize its power.”
Healthy Debate

“Zwarenstein not only plumbs the depths of pain and relief and dependence on relief but traces the blurred lines between writer and subject on that — perhaps needlessly — charged question: What do we do for pain and its wily life-thieving-or-enabling remedy? What would happen if we turned our focus to the prevention and elimination of suffering, rather than the demonization and criminalization of sufferers?”

Anna Mehler Paperny, author of Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me

“A valuable tool for the promotion of harm reduction.”
         Quill & Quire (p. 27)

        “Required reading … this volume belongs on every library shelf”.
WordCity Literary Journal

On Opium expands upon its novella-length predecessor, Opium Eater: The New Confessions, a brief meditation on opioid painkillers & pain that was a Globe 100 Best Book of 2016. That shorter book was also shortlisted for the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada book award.