Jonathan Tepper - Growing Up in the Heroin Capital of Europe (Ep. 303)

They settled in the neighborhood of Saint-Blasse, highest rate of heroin use in Europe, and immediately started helping the young men and women hooked on heroin. Our job was like bring addicts back to the house. And these men and women became like older brothers and sisters to my brothers and me. Welcome to Infinite Loops. We're gonna talk a lot today about this incredible moving and cinematic book.

shooting up the book is out now i highly obviously i'm biased because we're publishing it but i've read it more than once it is an amazing read please enjoy this episode with infinite loops jonathan tepper welcome to infinite loops let's set the scene it's 1985 you're seven and mom and dad tell you and your brothers Hey guys, we're gonna move. So my parents were Christian missionaries and they had been in um lived in Mexico before we arrived in Spain. So I'd really, at that age, only really known life as a missionary kid and basically your parents sort of tell you where you're gonna live and it's you know not necessarily the US, wherever your relatives might be. And so we they moved to Madrid and my father wanted to work with university students and be a student chaplain, but they settled in the neighborhood of Saint-Blasse because the the rent was cheap.

And at the time that had the uh highest rate of heroin use in Europe and there was a very large uh gypsy camp and it was like a central drug dealing point for the whole of Madrid. And so my parents settled there and immediately started helping the young men and women who were um, you know, hooked on heroin. And the the dream of becoming a student chaplain sort of went out the window, uh, not least because a lot of the students had very little interest in what my father was, you know, bringing them. Uh, they'd had quite a lot of uh, you know, Catholicism under Franco and so on.

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