Book Review: Dealing Addiction

Reviewed by Melissa Suggitt

Content Warnings: Physical abuse, sexual abuse, drug addiction

Dealing Addiction is about the failure of a system that should be saving lives instead of ending them. This book will change how you see addiction.

Born and raised in Ottawa’s poorer neighborhoods, Karen James grew up in a home where alcohol was always close by and violence was never far behind.

Her mother, a lab technician raising three children alone, drank heavily and lashed out often. Her father was both an alcoholic and a criminal, disappearing from her life early after a string of arrests. The chaos of that environment marked her deeply, and by the age of thirteen, she was drinking regularly, eventually moving into drug use.

The book follows this trajectory—from a childhood shadowed by her mother’s alcoholism, to her own adolescent descent into substance abuse, and finally into a decades-long career on the front lines of addiction services. What emerges is not a tale of tidy redemption, but a sharp, unrelenting indictment of a system that continues to fail its citizens.

James spares no one, least of all the governments and institutions that have, in her words, “turned harm reduction into a photo op while ignoring the people dying in our streets.” She writes with a directness that refuses to be softened for comfort. Her work has taken her into addiction-riddled neighborhoods where she has also lived for over twenty years, surrounded by daily reminders of the crisis. She has worked with people of all ages, from teenagers barely old enough to drive to adults who have been lost in the cycle for decades, and presents their stories in stark, often graphic detail.

These scenes are not gratuitous; they are the reality she has lived and witnessed. There is no love lost here for bureaucrats who congratulate themselves on incremental improvements while overdose numbers climb. James writes, “We have had the data for decades. We have had the solutions in our hands. We have chosen, time and time again, not to act.” That refusal to act, she makes clear, is a choice with a body count.

This book broke my heart into a million pieces. James describes cases where children grow up without a sober adult in their lives, where women trade safety for a place to sleep, and where overdose deaths are treated as routine. The trauma is not confined to the users themselves; it radiates outward into families, communities, and generations. Her account is a reminder that substance abuse is not an isolated problem. It is a community problem, a national problem, a moral problem.

The writing is stripped of pretension. James does not try to romanticize her journey or frame it as a simple arc from brokenness to healing. Her recovery is ongoing. Her work in the field is often thankless and exhausting. And yet, she remains committed to helping people claw their way back from the edge. “I do it because someone once did it for me,” she writes, “and because I cannot unsee what I have seen.”

For readers with personal trauma tied to addiction, family dysfunction, or abuse, this memoir will hit hard. Consider it a trigger warning as well as an emotional barometer. It is one of the most eye-opening pieces I’ve read on the Canadian addiction crisis. I came to it believing the system, though flawed, was moving in the right direction. I left it realizing how far we still have to go, and how much of what is presented as progress is performative at best. We need to care more about our communities, James argues, and that care must be measured in action, not rhetoric.

The importance of this book lies in its refusal to look away. It will not let you do it either. By the time you turn the last page, you will understand the scale of the crisis in a way that statistics could never convey. You may find yourself asking what more you can do—which is exactly the point.

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