Turning to Fiction to Combat Drug Abuse

Cheryl Reed, a newspaper and online journalism assistant professor at Newhouse, recently wrote an article for the Columbia Journalism Review about how fiction, rather than fact, can help her write about drug crisis from the past and to the present.

“Fiction, I realized, would allow me to take the parts I knew well—the girls and their secrets and their motivations and the games they played, the people part of the story—and overlay it with present-day reporting on how fentanyl-laced heroin was causing twice as many overdose deaths as crack,” she wrote.