The David Knight Show - Interview: Heroin, HIV, and the Power of Sacrificial Love

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

In his new book Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction, Jonathan Tepper recounts growing up in Madrid’s heroin epidemic as his missionary parents built a grassroots rehab network in one of Europe’s hardest-hit neighborhoods. Surrounded by addicts, crime, and a generation devastated by HIV, he watched lives restored through faith and discipline—while also burying friends and even his own brother after a tragic accident. This is a stark, deeply personal account of addiction, redemption, and what sacrificial love looks like in the middle of cultural collapse. Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code KNIGHT Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Joining us now is author Jonathan Tepper, 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, you know, the experience that he's had as an adult, talking about what he saw as a child. I always like that kind of. 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 Saint-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 in Madrid

at the time and it was through that sort of helping people day to day that led them to feel that they had a calling from God to change the mission or what they were trying to do and start a drug rehab center working with heroin addicts. And so that's what they did. And the drug center started in 1985 two years later. And how old were you at the time when all this began? I was seven when we arrived in Spain. And so my parents were sending me and my three brothers out to hand out little flyers

with our home phone number and address. And then they would have meetings in the house. So the addicts were coming over. And so I was like seven, eight, nine interacting with the addicts. often as they shoot out, panning them flyers. And then the men and women in the program became like older brothers to my brothers and me. Wow. And of course, crime goes hand in hand with that because people having to support their habit. And so you got to be friends with some people who were some serious criminals there as well. But it kind of reminds me the way your parents got involved

in this, just one person basically coming in, I think, and then another and then another gradually building until it got to be fairly large. It reminds me of George Mueller back in Victorian times, the time of Charles Dickens, where the real big issue then was not drug abuse, but it was kids who were orphans on the streets. And he brought in one, the another, the another, before you knew it, he had this vast orphanage that was there in Victorian England. Your parents grew that ministry, and of course they grew it without the help of the original missionary society. The people who sent them over, were supporting them, wanted something else done rather than this. This was what your parents saw.

They were drawn to that need and got involved in it and then had to find a way to support themselves. And that mission grew quite a bit, didn't it? Yeah. So the drug rehab center, when it started, had one addict who came in off the street. And he was sharing an apartment with Lindsay McKinsey. He was a young Australian missionary. And then Raul invited eight of his friends in, so they were all living in the apartment. the neighbors rightly complained about having, you know, a lot of recovering addicts living in a residential apartment. So then they moved out to a farm and then there were about 30 men living on the farm. And I think it was, as you, you know, drew the parallel with George Miller, it was not some grand plan to have an organization or to build something.

It's kind of naturally evolved, yeah. Exactly, showing love to one person at a time trying to answer a need. And I think the addicts themselves, one needed help, but two, responded. to that love and compassion, and then they wanted to help their friends. And that really was how the Drug Center grew from its beginning in 1985, and then 40 years later, it's still running in 20 countries with over 2,000 addicts in the program. Wow. And how'd you feel about these guys?

I mean, these are some pretty hardened street guys, and you're pretty young. Did it scare you? Were you fascinated with their lifestyle? What was your reaction to do? In general, it was probably more fascination than fear, but there were a couple addicts that I was afraid of. One of them in particular was Manolo Mahada, and his nickname in Spanish meant crazy.

And he got that because a dealer had stuck a gun in his face. And so he took the barrel of the gun and stuck in his mouth and dared the dealer to shoot him. And so people thought he was crazy, but he would grab my hand and just squeeze until it hurt. And I would punch him and it wouldn't do anything to him. I was always glad when Raoul, the first attic, was around. He would protect me.

But overall, the addicts really looked after us. My parents thought that they wouldn't do anything to us because we didn't have drugs and we didn't have money. So, you know, we were more curiosity to them than anything. You weren't attractive targets. Exactly. All they're looking at is money and drugs, money for the next hit that they're going to use for the next drugs that are there.

So your family is on your own. And they have to find money for this and money to support themselves. So what do they do? So a lot of the addicts had been manual laborers, you know, before they had gotten into a life of drugs. And one of the ways that they were raising money was basically starting businesses. So they started a secondhand furniture store where people would, you know, try to get rid of furniture, donate it. And the men would pick it up and restore the furniture and sell it. There were also, you know, gardening teams or plumbing, brick masonry.

So the men just did any odd jobs they could to pay the bills. And so these were essentially businesses run by recovering and former heroin addicts. And all that revenue provided for a free drug rehab for the addicts. That's great. So what is the motivation of these guys coming out? Are they just looking for a place to live, a place to crash or something? Are they really trying to get off of drugs? And were they looking for Christ, for example?

So I think most of them did want to get off drugs. So they saw that, you know, in the early stages, obviously, like people enjoy the first, you know, time they shoot up or, you know, the first couple times. But then it becomes less pleasurable or you're trying to increase the high. And then it's the life of heroin that leads them to, you know, lose their jobs, to lose family and friends. They end up, most of the kids or the young men and women stole much of their families, belong. Or money and not that they had that much to begin with because almost all of these were working class families And so it ends up breaking their social bonds and they often end up kicked out of their house living on the street And so for for many of them they did want to go for heroin and then also you know wanted to simply

Get a roof over their head and the some of them obviously were aware certainly almost all them aware of the Christian Ethos behind the program but I don't know that they were specifically setting out to you know to become Christians, I think they were attracted to the daily example of love that was shown to them. And when they had seen the friends that they used to sheet up with, now clean and off drugs, that was, I think, one of the things that truly inspired them. And so it was that love in action. And so you had some interesting stories about one of the guys who was doing furniture repair, one of the businesses that you guys were at. And you thought it was an interesting analogy for this whole program. Tell us a little bit about that.

Oh, yeah. So at first when I started writing the book, I hadn't like explicitly set out some of these themes in my own brain, but I guess these come out subconsciously. And I was writing about one of the main characters in the book, his name is Khambri, and he ran a secondhand furniture store. And I was struck by the beauty of them taking these discarded pieces of furniture that often, you know, were in a terrible state, repairing them, restoring them, turning them into beautiful. objects, often, you know, antiques that, you know, you didn't know that they were beautiful when they came in the store, but they were when they came out. And I thought it was a beautiful metaphor for their lives, the way that, you know, people's lives can be restored and turned around. And then it becomes a theme throughout the book where in the early days, you know, there was not much of a budget for the drug rehab center. So they would take over abandoned houses or farms and that were in a state of disrepair and rebuild them and redid them. And we did them and these houses too

were a metaphor for rebuilding and restoration. So it's a theme that runs through the book and is a central part of sort of the history and ethos of the program. That's right. And it really strikes me as something that Christ does with us,

you know, the carpenter, you know, he takes the he sees something that is there of value and he takes us apart and he fixes us and puts us back together again. That's what was happening to those addict's lives. I think that's a really apt metaphor. So how did your relationship with them? Did they become Christians? I'm sure not all of them did, but did a good number. Yeah, no one was under any obligation to believe anything. So people

could live in the program and they did have to participate in the morning devotional. So I mean, they had to sit there and listen. And then there was a Sunday morning church service. But, and so obviously they were exposed to quite a lot of preaching and, you know, Bible verses. But I think most of the addicts did end up converting because they saw that, you know, they often explicitly said, I want what he's got, right? So if Raulu was the first addict in the program came in and turned his life around and they had known him as a violent criminal on the streets and an addict, and then they saw that he turned into someone who would give up his own bed so that people could sleep, you know, while he slept on the sofa or the floor, that deeply touched people. And so it was that lived example of love and compassion that motivated others to want to come in and then transmit that to the next group of people who came in or the next generation. Yes.

Yes. That's another story that sort of reminds me of the cross and switchblade. And that became gradually built into an entire program. And I talked to a pastor a few weeks ago, Matt Trojala, who has a ministry. And that's what got him. He was from broken family, and it was that program that eventually got to him and made a difference for him. So it's not a situation where somebody, you know, go in there and you don't hand them a track and tell them, go read this or give them, you know, try to scare them. But instead, they see the fruit of what Christ does in other people's lives, starting with your parents and moving out like a ripple in a pond, you know, gradually.

affecting more and more people. That's a great way to do it, I think. Yes, one of the key lessons in writing is show, don't tell. You should set the scene rather than tell the reader that they need to know something, and it creates for better writing and better enjoyment from the reader. But I would say in life in general, it's actually a good rule of show, don't tell. And one of the things that my parents quoted when the drug center was starting was from St. Francis of Assisi who said, preach the gospel at all times, use words, if necessary, and this idea of show, don't tell. Right, yeah, that's great.

You have an interesting title for one of these chapters, An Older Brother and a Missing Eyeball. What is that about? So the visits out to the men's residences in the farms were always humorous, odd, and memorable. And so in that specific chapter, I was very young. I had to be probably nine or so at the time,

but my brothers and I would go out and stay with Raula in the farm. And, you know, one of the addicts, he used to rob stores by taking an axe under his trench coat and destroy things. And another one, he had a pet ferret that he brought into the drug center and he would swim around in the makeshift pool. But one of them had an eyeball, Manuel de Vasco, that would occasionally fall out when he was playing soccer and football. And they'd have to stop the game and search for the eyeball. And then when he'd subway, you know, one of his eyes, if he fell asleep, one of his eyes would close. and the other would just sort of stare at the people. So these were very interesting characters

who were larger than life in many ways. And what I tried to do in that chapter is sort of give them a flavor for the different characters in the drug center. Yeah, yeah. And so you're living as children in this area that's a very poor, very rough area. You'd play soccer in the streets

and it wasn't just the people who had come to your family for help, but you point out that you would see syringes in the street and a lot of things like that. even with blood on them. Talk a little bit about the environment there of that town. Yeah, so Spain in the mid-80s was growing very quickly and in 1975, Franco had died and so they transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. So you had this sort of high rate of economic growth, a lot of social housing projects being built at the outskirts of Madrid, and then the way

Spanish zoning and planning works, basically you have these sort of, you know, either high-rise housing and social housing and then like empty fields and in the empty fields you had behind our house there was a dump where you know brick masons and others would would dump construction material there's quite a lot of garbage too and then further down two blocks away there was a gypsy village that had about 3,000 gypsies and you know they they sold a lot of drugs they certainly weren't the only one spaniards sold them too but people came from all over Madrid to buy their drugs at this camp called Los Focos. And so we would see, you know, they used needles everywhere in the fields by the gypsy camp.

And generally it had blood that was drying or dried. And it was sort of through that that then, you know, comes about in the book where I talk about how most of the early addicts shared needles and became HIV positive. And then in jail, one of the addicts, Hamdi, they had like, you know, I think two syringes for 200 inmates. And so the AIDS, the HIV virus spread very, very quickly among the addicts in the mid to early 80s. Wow. Wow.

Yeah, that's one of the things I've talked about in terms of our war on drugs. You know, it has been so fruitless that we've done this over half a century now. Because it is a spiritual problem at its root. It really is. And you're not going to stop it with an addiction. Now I've talked about how they're sharing needles in a lot. prison, they don't have enough needles, but they've got plenty of drugs. They're doing fine with drugs, and we have people in the United States that are dying from overdose in prisons all the time.

So what kind of a society do we have to have if you've got to try to interdict that by force? There's something else there that is really the answer, I think. And so all this is happening before the AIDS epidemic, but then your family winds up at the very center of that, of course. Now, you mentioned heroin over and over again. Is that, are there other drugs that people are using? Or is that kind of the king of it all? Why is so much of a focus on heroin? Yeah, so heroin really was sort of the end of the line where most people didn't start with heroin.

They were generally starting, you know, with alcohol and cigarettes, which don't necessarily lead to harder drugs, but then they would do, you know, hashish and cocaine. And they were generally doing multiple drugs before they got to heroin. They were rarely starting with it. but heroin was the big drug in the neighborhood.

And in Madrid at the time, and it's certainly the most addictive. And the one that has the most impact in terms of taking over people's lives where they need to constantly be getting drugs to shoot up. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's interesting. And I wonder what the situation is right now. They moved on to fentanyl or something like that. We're out of that scene now, right?

Well, in the United States, a lot of the opioids and fentanyl have really taken over. In Spain, I think it's starting to, I'm out of that, but obviously I speak to my father and still runs the drug rehab center. But there are sort of newer drugs and they're of the same family in terms of like opioids. But heroin is still, at least in Madrid, is very, very big. Now what was it that got people off of the drugs? Because I know that you look at a lot of the secular programs where they're just doing counseling, they'll offer them methadone or something like that as an alternative. And then people become addicted to that.

What was happening with your family? What were they doing to get people off of drugs? What was the path? So the drug center in Batel at the time and still didn't use drug substitutes like methadone. And it was just cold turkey to get off. So there was no alcohol, nicotine, or any other drugs in the program or methadone. The Spanish government didn't, and private. organizations didn't have any methadone treatments in the 80s in Spain.

And it really was basically, I think, in the early 90s that they started giving out quite a lot more methadone. And then as they became aware of the AIDS virus, they started giving out tons of little small bleach bottles where even if they were using the same needle, they could at least clean the needles. And that came later. One of the issues with methadone is that while there is some success with it, generally, people are supplementing their methadone with other drugs, so they're polydrug users. And at least from the research that I've seen, back in your point, it's not a purely physical addiction that causes the whole addiction problem. There's generally other things that drive people to take drugs,

whether it's, for example, in the neighborhood at the time, very high youth unemployment rate, and drugs entering. A lot of young people were not in school, they were not working, and plenty of time to experiment with drugs. And so if you did get off heroin, but go back to hang out with the exact same friends that you were doing heroin before, you're likely to get right back on it.

And so it's the change in the lifestyle, the change in the surroundings, or dealing with underlying problems is generally much more effective. And so a lot of the men and women in the program didn't go back to their old friends. They stayed in the program and tried to bring in the friends to the program,

or try to go out and have different friends, you know, who were not involved in the same habit. Talking about how your family was in your own little universe, what was the life for you? I mean, your American kids are speaking English. I'm sure he spoke Spanish a lot as well, but, you know, are you there immersed in the Spanish school system or are you homeschooled? What did that look like on a daily basis? Yeah, so we were briefly in the Spanish school system, but then there was a very small missionary school that my parents sent us to and there were many years where my parents didn't have enough money to send us even to that missionary school missionaries tend not to have very much money and some years there were not a lot of tithes

and in the late 1980s the dollar lost about half its value versus the peseta after the plaza cords and so we were home school for about two years by my mother and there's a chapter called our own little universe my parents were highly literate and used to have very long devotionals in the morning and it after dinner, which we hated at the time, where they'd, you know, read things like St. Augustine's City of God and T.S. Eliot. And while I hated it at the time, I think it really did, you know, provide us with a great education. And we had this sort of very strange life, a hyperliterate life at home. And then, you know, going out and spending time on the forums with the recovering addicts and playing soccer out the street. So, and that continued throughout our entire educational

life. That's kind of interesting. That's something that I did with our kids when we were homeschooling them. I bored them to death, reading to them. But actually, they got to where they liked it. We tried to teach them to read at the very beginning, and they pushed back on it. They were not interested in those books. And so we kind of thought, well, let's regroup this and see how we can approach it and decided that what we would do is try to build a love of literature for them. So I was the one who was going to read all the books to them, and that's basically how it worked. I guess it kind of worked that way with you as well.

You're talking about how there was a tremendous amount of books always around on the table and other things like that with your parents. Yes, I think one of the most important things for teaching is not necessarily conveying specific information, but rather cultivating that love of learning, that curiosity. That's right. And I think if parents or teachers do that, then the kids will end up teaching themselves. So they will have the desire to go pick up the books to read great works of literature. We had encyclopedias, National Geographic, and so we spent a lot of our time just randomly pulling them off the shelves and reading.

I absolutely loved it. And then we ended up working our way through our parents' library when we were homeschooled. And then when we were able to go back to school, that practice and habit of sort of reading for ourselves continued. And then when I went off to college, I realized that actually I was like fairly bored in a lot of my classes and ended up doing quite a lot of advanced studies and research projects with professors because I realized that was the way I enjoyed learning most. And unfortunately, the professors were kind enough to indulge me. That's great. Yeah, you point out that you and your brothers learned that you could teach yourselves anything from books. I think that's the key thing.

I think having the tools of learning, somebody expressed it as saying, you know, when we're teaching, this is something people need to think about what they're doing homeschooling. It's not the filling of a bucket, but it's a lighting of a fire that you're trying to get, right? That love of learning or that love of finding out that information. And that's the key thing. Sounds like that's what your parents did with you as well. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you do that, then it comes from inside. It's the students who want to, you know, and I had different interests that my brother's had, but each one of us then had the desire to go off and follow our own passions. You talk about how you went back to America and you had a tragedy that happened in your family

in a car accident. Tell us a bit about that. Yes. So missionaries, and it depends, it varies by mission, but generally they'll go back for what's called a furlough, and that might be every three years or four years. We would go back every four years. And so in 1991, we were visiting my mother's family, staying in Wilmington, North Carolina. And my father, wanted to go on a road trip to kitty hawk and so we were driving there and my older brother who was just about to turn 17 was was driving and the car went off the road on a country on a bend in the country road and my my youngest brother timothy who i was closest to and i used to walk him to school every day and uh cared for him uh he he died in that car accident and uh it completely changed my life

It changed my entire family's life. There really is only before and after. You know, when a family faces a tragedy like that. And after he died, we all grieved differently. I think often there's research and statistics showing that obviously it leads to an increase in divorce rates and couples because the husband's and the wife grieved differently. It affected my brothers and me and her personality. But much more broadly, a lot of the men in our families in Madrid in our neighborhood, they had lost. sons and daughters to overdoses and then to AIDS. And I think it made us much more loving and

empathetic to them and understanding their loss. And I think they also realized my parents didn't leave the mission field or go back to the United States. They continued working, trying to help others. And so I think they realized that, you know, we were sort of just like them. And, you know, no one in life is spared a sickness or death. And it really was the defining event of my life, certainly. And I hope it's led us all to have more love and compassion and empathy. How old was Timothy when he died? It was a week before he turned 10.

Wow. And you pointed out in your book that you and he, as you just said, were very close on issues. You were five years older than him. And you both shared love of jazz, you said. And the two of you were talking about what you wanted to do in life. Were you a musician? Did you guys aspire to being musicians? Because you were about 15 years old or something.

I used to play the trumpet. And I think our dreams, of course, were always exceeded our abilities. But we certainly... For all of us, of course, yeah. Yes, we loved listening to jazz. And when we went back to the library in Wilmington, North Carolina, which was down near the Cotton Exchange, we know the public library, we could rent or try to check out as many books or recordings as we wanted.

And we just absolutely loved listening to Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong. And so we loved Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. They were the great duo. And so I was going to be Dizzy Gillespie on my trumpet. He had just gotten a saxophone for a month before he died. And he was going to be like Charlie Parker. And in the book, I touch on the fact that almost all of these guys

were either heroin addicts or drugs and alcoholism as well, in cases like Stan Gets. but it's interesting in John Coltrane got off heroin and he had a religious experience and he recorded an entire album called A Love Supreme which is about God and so it was very interesting the parallels between the jazz musicians and the addicts we were growing up around

and so I have a few pages in there on that which was sort of a... Yeah. We were really into at the time. I didn't know that about John Coltrane. I didn't know that he got off of it had a religious experience. A Christian experience that he had?

Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of, you know, I actually played once with Dizzy Gillespie in college. We paid him to play with us. He came for a concert series. And so the jazz band we had in college is Dizzy Gillespie. Boy, he had a set of chops cheeks that went out to here. It was very unusual and quite a trademark. I think that helped his popularity quite a bit. It certainly was an interesting way to look at. We also had Maynard Ferguson and, Don Ellis had the thing. And so, yeah, I was very much involved in that, but I was, again, as you point out, my dreams were bigger than my achievements in that area. But when you get into the music world like that, you do see a lot of drugs, especially if you're playing as a musician and they still had live music back in those days. And what was it? Did you ever have a situation where you looked at people as you got older, if you looked to people and you saw them

doing drugs and other things and you were tempted in that or you thought about doing that. Do you ever have a situation like that being immersed in that environment? So there's always a lot of curiosity in terms of, you know, what's the physical sensation like? And I do deal with that a little bit in the book. And, you know, I was curious as to how much did it cost to get a gram of heroin and how did you prepare it and all these kinds of things. But I never ever did drugs. I knew people who had died of overdoses. I'd seen people being attended to being taken ambulances who would overdose by the gypsy camp.

And it was just not something that I ever wanted to do because, you know, there's always the possibility of overdosing too. And so it was something that I never even experimented with. And that's a key thing, I think. You know, when we look at this and the people that we are around that we, when we see alcoholism, when we see drug addiction or some of these other things, and we see how it has been so destructive on these people's lives, I think that's a real deterrent. It certainly was for me, you know, being around that in some regards,

but also, you know, growing up in a family like yours where that was not done. And so you see these two different worlds contrasted, and it's like, yeah, I really don't want that. I think it's a valuable lesson. Yes. And I think that, unfortunately, some people, you know, are exposed to it and still do it. but it certainly it can be a very good antidote. It even put me off of dancing, I've got to say.

It's a running joke with my wife and I was like, I'm sorry, I'm not going to dance. I've watched too many drunk people out there dancing and put me off of that in just a small way. That's just a small part of it. But in the bigger picture, you see that as well. Now, you talk about your calling and something that you saw on an inscription on a wall. Tell us a little bit about that. that?

Yeah, so the early addicts and shared needles become HIV positive and then the average incubation periods about five years and for some it's much shorter, for some it's longer. But most of the early generation of addicts were spending quite a lot of time in the hospital in the late 80s or early 90s and many died there. But I used to go visit them in junior high and high school evenings and weekends and the main hospital in Madrid where they would take the addicts for AIDS was Ramoni Kejal and it was named after the first Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize in medicine and in science. And at the entrance to the hospital, there's a quote from him and it said,

To do oombre, which is every man can become the sculptor of his own mind if he sets himself the task. And that quote was deeply inspiring to me. And particularly after my brother died, where I found solace or escape in books, the idea that I could be the sculptor of my own mind. I could develop my mind was something that inspired me and it still does to this day. And that was one of the great experiences of my life seeing that quote and then trying to apply it. And how did you apply that in your life? You say you went to university in the United States and what did you say?

study and what did you wind up doing? How'd that affect you? So when I got to, I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and I wasn't very good socially. I didn't have that many friends. I went in 94. That was the 94, 95 was the peak of death from AIDS and so a lot of my friends were still in Madrid and I didn't know if I'd be able to get back and see them again. And so I really withdrew and poured all my energies. into my studies. But I studied economics and history at Chapel Hill. And I ended up graduating with highest honors in history

and honors in economics. And I'm partly in a financial need, trying to get a lot of scholarships and fellowships. But also, I think, you know, I was trying to make my brother and Timothy proud of me as trying to live a life for two. And then in my senior year, I applied and was enormously fortunate that,

I was able to become a road scholar and go off to Oxford. Wow. What was that like? That's a very... From the slums of Spain where there's heroin on the streets, anything to Oxford, what kind of a culture shock was that for you? You know, it was pretty big. But it felt like an immense relief.

My parents had sacrificed an enormous amount over the years, and whenever they did have money, they would give it to the Derd Rehab Center. But I felt that what they had done is give us the gift of learning and reading. And so the Rhodes application and interview itself, it's very, very difficult things statistically to get. And I think my year, there was something like 990 nominations and 32 scholarships. And so it totally changed my life. I don't know where I would be or what I'd be doing otherwise.

but it allowed me to Oxford, and I met an enormous amount of very interesting people that I'm still most, many of them I'm still friends with today and absolutely love. But it was, and even there again, it was a bit schizophrenic. I'd leave Oxford and go back to Madrid or go visit friends in Marseille or Naples and work in the drug rehabs, like in my Oxford breaks, you know. Wow. Talk about the extremes of life. Again, we're talking about, to Jonathan Tepper, the book is Shooting Up, a Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love, and Loss. And you had so many people that you loved and lost because of AIDS. And as this all began, I remember in the United States, everybody was uncertain of how it was

being passed along. And there were concerns about even, you know, well, if this is going to be passed in the blood, can we, is this something that we can get from mosquitoes or something like that? What was the fear of that like there in the area and epicenterily of that? I still remember vividly when my parents told us about the virus because we had been out playing soccer and came in too late for dinner. And I thought they were going to punish us. They called us into the living room and if they were going to punish us for, you know,

staying out too late. And instead they told us about the virus and they told us about how it was transmitted. And in 1985, they did know how it was transmitted. They knew that it came from either bodily fluids. So whether it's sex, which obviously we were too young for at the time, or sharing needles, which we didn't do, but they told us to not touch the dirty needles, which we took as obvious. So I almost wondered why they were telling us that.

But even so, in society at large, there was still this enormous irrational fear of people with AIDS, where you couldn't get it by shaking their hand or hugging them or giving them a kiss on the cheek is one does in Spain to, you know, both cheeks to men and women to say hi. And some of my early memories of, I didn't go to the hospital because my parents thought I was too young, but my father went and told the stories. And then when I went, you could see it.

Sometimes even family members were afraid to go and hug their own children. You know, were HIV positive. And I think the level of ignorance was very high for many, many years, even after it was well established, how it was spread or not. And the people with AIDS in the 1980s, whether it was gays in the United States, which is where it started and was the main, or Spain, which is near venous drug use, really were sort of the lepers and the outcasts in the 1980s. And my parents' view was that if you read the New Testament, Jesus spent time with the lepers, healing them, with the outcasts. And so we never treated anyone any differently. and my parents thought it was the essence of Christian love and compassion to try to show love to them.

Yeah, I remember watching a Ben-Hur with my kids, and Travis was, we were watching it. And at one point, you know, leprosy is at the center of it when the characters gets leprosy. And at one point, the main character reaches over and touches. And he jumped like it was some kind of a slasher film or something. So it is that you see these horrible wasting diseases that people are concerned they're going to get. and it is understandable how people feel that way. But now, all the people that you were involved in, especially the early people that you became very close to,

some of the first addicts that came into the program, they all wound up getting AIDS, right? Was it fatal for all of them? Yes. Yes, for almost all of them. There's one or two from the very early days who were still alive. But like that early generation that I met on the streets, they died in 1994, well, even before,

but the peak was 94-95. And the Chambri, another main character in the book, it was like an older brother, 96. So it was an entire generation of addicts, you know, who ended up dying. And so it wasn't just one loss. It really was like, you know, being in a war zone where there were dozens and dozens of deaths.

And it really did mark me in the Drug Rehab Center. And even at the time, you know, My parents organized a conference about AIDS so people could ask questions and talk to each other about it. And then we knew about it. But I think everyone just sort of got on with their lives and tried to help other people. It was only the 20th year anniversary of the Drug Rehab Center when they were doing a video and slideshow of the history of the center. And they had, you know, the friends that we've lost and they had photos of a lot of the early people. And this was at the time I started writing the books.

I wrote this about 20 years ago and just put it aside. And I was just struck by the number of people, you know, one after the other in that slide show. And then that's, I think, when the magnitude of the loss and what we had actually lived through really hit me. Truly is an amazing life that you had there. And your parents lived it to the fullest. Your mother has passed away. But your dad is still at this work, isn't he? Yes.

He's 79. He had a minor stroke last year, which fortunately he's recovered from very well. And he wants to work helping others until the day he dies. And I think he will. I hope he will. He's an old lion and is working. He doesn't want to retire. He just wants to help other people.

Yeah, you talked about as he's reading at the dinner table, he calls it as pontifications as he's teaching you. What about your brothers? Did any of them get involved in that? What do they wind up doing in their lives? So my older brother, David, did work quite a few years running the drug rehab center in New York City. So he'd been an accountant.

And so his background in training was in business and accounting. But he worked with my parents for a while. He had an autistic son and ended up for family reasons, leaving the Drug Rehab Center, ran his own accounting and investment practice. Now he works with me running Pravatt Capital. And then my younger brother, Peter, well, he and David, actually both went and got Oxford degrees after I did, and they studied theology.

But Peter ended up staying on and became. a student chaplain at St. Aldeates, Oxford, which is an Anglican church. And then he moved to Florida and now pastors an Anglican church or an Episcopalian church in Florida. So he stayed, you know, further closer to what my parents were doing in terms of ministry. But my brother, David, and I, you know, work and investing. Where is he in Florida? I grew up in Florida. Yes, he is, I think he lives in DeLand, and I think his church is in, in, my, my, Mine's going blank right now. It's near the coast.

It's one of these. I grew up in Tampa, is the reason to ask. I was just thinking about how our paths probably crossed one time with the other because we were there near Chapel Hill, was where we lived right about the time that you were there. So probably ships that passed in the night. Who knows? So it is a fascinating book.

Your parents and your family had a fascinating life, and it is a life of love and a life of love an accomplishment that I think you can all be proud of. And I think it's really important for us to go back and look at these true life stories. I prefer, you know, truth is always stranger than fiction, and it is always much more important, of course. And so I think we can all learn a lot from these true stories. And like I said before at the very beginning of this, I really like these stories of people talking about their childhood as an adult and the perspective that they have on it as they get further long in life and as they're adults.

So thank you so much for joining us. Jonathan Tepper, and the book is Shooting Up, a Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love, and Loss. And people can pre-book this now, right? When is this coming out? It'll be out next week. And so I don't know when the podcast will be released, but it'll be out, I think, February 17th. And they can buy it wherever they buy books. So Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or their local bookstore.

Again, the title is Shooting Up, A Memoir of Havis. heroin, AIDS, love, and loss. The author is Jonathan Tepper. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Thank you for sharing your life and your story, and look forward to reading the full thing. I've got the synopsis here, but looking forward to reading the whole thing. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, too. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us.

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