Rhonda Evans was 40 years old and addicted to drugs when she decided she needed help. She had three sons — two living with her parents and one with her — and she had been living in a motel, cobbling together money to pay for her habits.
On the presidential campaign trial this month, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie shed real tears and moved millions speaking personally about loved ones who have struggled with drug addiction.
Yehoshua Lowy, a former cocaine and heroin user, said he weighed 127 pounds and had track marks up and down his arms when he entered the Los Angeles-based Chabad Residential Treatment Center in 2010.
Rita Lowenthal raised her family in a nice Jewish home, lived in a nice Jewish neighborhood and belonged to a nice Jewish temple. So how did her son become a heroin addict at age 13?
The need for an answer to that question, as well as a desire for closure, is what inspired Lowenthal to pen \”One-Way Ticket: Our Son\’s Addiction to Heroin\” (Beaufort Books, $14), a memoir that compiles her experiences and correspondence with her son and his journal entries while in and out of San Quentin State Prison.
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