Dahlia took her first oxycodone at nineteen, months into her first semester as a college freshman. She was curious and a little naive with a penchant for trying her luck — and drug addictions, she thought, were for other people.

“It was the worst kind of stupid mistake,” she said.

What followed was months of chipping pills; oxycodone and codeine. She crushed them in a straw and snorted them in the bathroom before class. But pills were expensive. Heroin was cheap. Within the year she had dropped out of school and graduated to an intravenous heroin habit that she’d wrestle with for the next five years.