It begins in February 2008 with her then-19-year-old son, J.P. Vericker, being handcuffed by police outside their suburban New York home, high on drugs and ensnared in an addiction that made him desperate and sometimes violent. His hand was broken from punching a wall in a rage the day before.

It was not the first time the police had responded to the Verickers’ home because of trouble with their son. As officers restrained J.P. by holding him against the side of the house, an officer gently posed a question. The police department would keep responding as needed, of course, but “at some point, you have got to do something.”

“We have enough on him to arrest him,” the officer said. “What do you want to do?”

And, just like that, the Verickers were face-to-face with a decision they had seen coming but deeply hoped to avoid.

Nancy recounts this story in Unchained: Our Family’s Addiction Mess is Our Message (Clear Faith Publishing, 2018), which she co-authored with J.P., now eight years sober. It relates not only the course of J.P.’s addiction but also its impact on his family, and the spirituality that was a lifeline for both Nancy and her son. “I really did, honestly, feel this sense of calling” in co-authoring the book, says Nancy, a spiritual director and youth minister and a 2009 alumna of Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

In it, she charts her journey to accepting a seeming paradox, one that ran against her every instinct as a parent. To help J.P., she had to stop trying to rescue him. As she puts it in the book, “You must surrender to win. You must let go to get your loved one back.”

“My Manzo”

The second-oldest of the Verickers’ four children, J.P. wanted for nothing when he was growing up in their tight-knit family. He was a charming, kind, energetic child known to his mother as her little man, “my Manzo.” When the Verickers brought their adopted daughter, 2-year-old Grace, from China to their Westchester County home, J.P. was the first to quell her tears and make her laugh.

Things changed in eighth grade. He struggled in school and felt listless and depressed, and fell in with a partying crowd during his first year of high school. By sophomore year, he was drinking and smoking pot daily. He grew belligerent, cutting class and staying out past his curfew and getting into trouble with the police.

His parents saw a series of counselors and psychiatrists, looking for answers. They unsuccessfully tried to help J.P. by sending him to a wilderness program and a boarding school. Then, in senior year, he dropped out of their local public high school and started using cocaine and Xanax, sometimes together, a toxic combination that put him in a “manic state,” as he puts it. Mixing a stimulant and sedative, he writes, “can easily kill you.”

Family life moved forward in other ways—the Verickers’ eldest daughter, Annie, was in college and enjoying it; their next-youngest daughter, Molly, was a high-school freshman, making friends and playing field hockey; and Grace was doing well in her new elementary school.

But Nancy’s life was mostly consumed with J.P.’s addiction. Grappling with insomnia and worry, she realized he was stealing from her to pay for drugs. Bitter confrontations ensued, and in February 2008, in a rage, J.P. accosted his parents at home because of money he thought he was owed.

At the end of their rope, Nancy and Joe Vericker moved forward with the option they had been dreading, the one they had warned their son about: They decided to press charges of harassment. As Nancy stood by, distraught, Joe quietly gave permission to one of the officers who had responded to their home: “You can arrest our son.”

Tough Love

In order for J.P. to overcome his addiction, he had to suffer its consequences, she and her husband were told by the treatment professionals they consulted. He had to hit bottom, and they had to let him, counter to their every parental instinct. In addition to letting him be arrested, they had to refrain from rescue efforts like providing shelter and meeting his expenses as he continued to use.

After J.P. was arrested, his parents got a court order of protection and told him to stay away from the family’s home unless he agreed to seek treatment. Viewing it as a vacation, J.P. agreed to go to a treatment center in south Florida, chosen by his parents because of the wealth of post-treatment options in that area.

His story entered a new phase: detoxifications, relapses, halfway houses, flophouses, and homelessness. He struggled toward the realization that he needed help. Today, he has a clear view of his warped thinking from that time.

“Being addicted is like having rabies,” he writes in Unchained, which includes first-person accounts by both him and his mother. “To me, in my addicted mind, my life was normal,” and others were to blame for the strife and altercations in his life.

In lucid moments, he felt a deep yearning to stop using. During a brief trip home from Florida, he broke down in tears for two hours, “flooded with both anger and sadness,” he writes. “I was starting to realize I could not stop on my own.”

Nancy, meanwhile, alternated between hope when he seemed to be recovering and anguish, tears, and sleepless nights when he relapsed. She often didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

And yet, life went on. Family responsibilities beckoned. She gained solace and strength from family, friends, and community, but also from her degree program at Fordham.

Ignatian Lessons

A former journalist, Nancy Vericker first enrolled at Fordham at the suggestion of her spiritual director during a time when she was tending to the children at home, doing occasional volunteer work, and spiritually searching. She spent more than a decade earning a master’s degree, and the studies would help pull her through difficult times—in part, because of the Ignatian teachings in the curriculum.

“There was this thing that was oppressively suffocating the life out of me and my family, and Ignatian spirituality helped me push back,” she says.

In keeping with the Ignatian view of the soul as a battleground, she fought against feelings of desolation—depression, fear, anxiety—by finding consolation in the joys of family life and moments of grace, holding on to those as a way of building generosity of heart and fueling hope.

“Ignatian spirituality saved me in many ways,” she says.

What also helped her were the relationships built up during the program. When J.P. was homeless, she considered quitting, but she persisted with encouragement from a classmate, Mark Mossa, S.J., who went on to become campus ministry director at Spring Hill College in Alabama.

And she became close to Janet Ruffing, R.S.M., then head of the spiritual direction program. When graduation day came for Nancy, she decided to instead go to her daughter Grace’s First Communion, which fell on the same day.

“I knew how torn she was, having made that choice,” says Sister Ruffing, now a professor at Yale Divinity School. “She was consistently making those kinds of choices for her family.”

So Sister Ruffing drove to the Verickers’ home and brought her the degree, entering the house in the midst of a post-Communion party. “They all screamed,” she says with a laugh. “I just felt she deserved to get her degree on graduation day.”

It was a powerful gesture, Nancy says, because she was in despair at the time. She had her doubts that J.P. would survive.

Refusing him help was painful. During one Christmas season, J.P. was calling home over and over from Florida, saying he was homeless and hungry, asking for money. “You cannot under any circumstances send him money,” J.P.’s treatment program director said. He told the story of a woman who, faced with a similar plea, wired money to her addict son, who then spent it on drugs and died of an overdose.

The Verickers kept saying “no,” even on Christmas Day, a few days after J.P.’s 21st birthday. “We will help you when you are ready to get help for your addiction,” Joe Vericker told J.P. on the phone. “We love you, remember that.”

Recovery

J.P.’s recovery began in a low moment, just after he had been jailed in Florida. “I was fearful for my life if I went on using,” he writes. He surrendered his false pride, his sense that “I knew all the answers,” and reentered treatment and joined a 12-step program.

For many addicts, he says, recovery is like dragging rocks in the beginning because they’re physically wrecked, their lives are in ruins, and drugs offer instant relief from the physical agonies of withdrawal. “Their mind is under the impression that they need [drugs]to survive,” he says.

He overcame these obstacles through meditation, help from a support network, and prayer—a crucial defense in the moments when his addiction was banging at the door.

“It was like alarms were going off,” he says. “I was scared that I was going to be, like, possessed and just pick up drugs and use them, because it felt like what had happened sometimes.” He would instantly stop and pray, over and over, “God, please remove the obsession.”

The stark choice he faced in those days has stayed with him. Any passing temptations to accept a drink are quickly quashed by one simple thought: “I don’t want to die.”

The spirituality of his Catholic upbringing helped him stay centered and clean as he earned a GED diploma and a bachelor’s degree in addiction studies, and enrolled in an M.B.A. program. In his mother, he had someone who could relate to his struggle; nearly three decades ago, she had to overcome her own addiction to alcohol.

“The twelve steps are a bond I love having with my son,” she writes. She and J.P. don’t act as each other’s sponsor, the person who “takes you through the steps and offers guidance based on their own experience, strength, and hope in the program.” But they do “share a love of the fellowship,” she says, “and we can give each other advice—as a mother and son would to each other.”

Today, as a board-certified substance abuse counselor and co-founder of the outpatient Northeast Addictions Treatment Center in Quincy, Massachusetts, J.P. spends his days overseeing the center’s operation and counseling people addicted to opioids that are far more deadly than the drugs he was using. And, since the publication of Unchained, he has joined his mother in spreading the book’s message of hope and recovery and trying to reduce the stigma addicts face.

They shared that message on NBC’s Today show and on the SiriuxXM radio/television show Conversation with Cardinal Dolan, among other programs. Their story has spread through word-of-mouth, and some mothers have contacted her to say “I felt like I was reading my own story,” Nancy says.

“I get up every morning and try to think of ways to get this story out there. It’s just to let people know that help is available. I will answer every email, we’ll talk on the phone, I’ll call people back,” she says, “because I feel like this is part of what I’m supposed to be doing with my life right now.”

Roddy Boyd and Bernice Yeung are using new models to keep hard-hitting investigative reporting alive in the “fake news” era—bringing to light shady business practices contributing to the opioid crisis, and amplifying the voices of those largely overlooked by the #MeToo movement

Seven years ago, Roddy Boyd was attending a journalism conference when he came to a startling realization. He’d already had a long career exposing financial companies’ chicanery for the likes of the New York Post and Fortune before he was laid off after the financial crash of 2008. And he was well into writing his first book, an exposé of corporate insurance giant AIG. As he looked around at the conference, however, he realized that many of his colleagues had been laid off or taken buyouts from newspapers that had cratered in the past decade.

“All my peers from 15 years of reporting had gone,” he says, “and no one was doing business stuff.” Instead, the room was filled with reporters from nonprofits, including venerable outfits such as the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and upstarts like ProPublica. Sensing the winds, Boyd decided to start his own nonprofit focusing on financial investigations: the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation, or SIRF, a reference to the surf culture in his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina.

“I thought, ‘I’ll put on my Brooks Brothers suit and go to the Ford Foundation, and they’d give me money,’” he says. It didn’t quite work out that way. Still, Boyd persisted as SIRF’s sole journalist, peeling the tops off hedge funds and pharmaceutical firms to reveal rotten layers underneath. In the past six years, he has exposed frauds, scams, and lies that regulators have been unable or unwilling to uncover, and SIRF’s coverage has played a role in putting upward of 20 people in jail. “I personally don’t want to live in a world where corporations have only modest fear of government intervention,” he says. “Someone’s got to stand in the gap.”

Even as journalism has struggled in the past 20 years, investigative reporting has managed to survive, even thrive, reborn in new models that have reinvigorated its function as a watchdog on democracy. Oftentimes that means ferreting out stories the daily newspapers and TV news programs miss. That’s what CIR reporter Bernice Yeung has done in tackling harrowing stories of sexual violence against immigrants, years before the #MeToo movement made sexual assault mainstream news. First appearing in a pair of documentaries for PBS Frontline, her reporting has grown into a book, In a Day’s Work, published last March.

Boyd and Yeung use different skills, with Boyd performing a deep dive into complicated financial documents and Yeung patiently interviewing subjects in difficult situations, but both have shone a light in dark corners.

“When you hit that sweet spot of strong edited reporting with a strong human story,” Yeung says, “you show people why they should care about an issue—and how we should rethink things that are doing people harm.”

Two Worlds on Wall Street

Boyd grew up in Westchester County, where his father was a hedge-fund manager. He always wanted to be a journalist. At Fordham, he wrote for the paper, an alternative weekly that saw itself as a campus watchdog. He recalls how he and his fellow reporters investigated crime on campus. They assumed most of the crime would be coming from off campus; when they looked at the data, however, they realized that 80 percent was student-on-student crime. “It was a really powerful moment to me; you could walk into something with a totally fixed preconception, but then the data shows you things that will change your view,” he says.

That combination of targeting hard issues and supporting them with data would come to define Boyd’s career as a reporter—but first, he says, “life threw me a curveball.”

After college, his girlfriend (now wife) Laura Ann Caprioglio, FCRH ’90, became pregnant. In order to support his new family, Boyd took a job on Wall Street, working at his father’s hedge fund for eight years. In retrospect, the experience was invaluable for a future financial reporter. “I met a lot of CEOs and CFOs, and with a couple of drinks in them, what they said was very different than what they said on the conference calls,” he says. He got the sense there were two worlds on Wall Street—one generating incredible wealth and prosperity through the free market, the other hurting real people through instances of fraud and greed.

Boyd became committed to exposing that world, writing first for the now-defunct New York Sun. He dug into the financial documents of companies to find out what they weren’t saying in public. “You really get a hell of a thrill when you’ve got a conference call transcript in your left hand assuring you all is well, and you’ve got an exhibit from a buried state lawsuit in your other hand where they are clearly doing the precise mathematical opposite,” he says.

While working at the Sun in 2004, Boyd began investigating insurance giant AIG. When the financial crisis occurred a few years later, he saw the company’s habit of insuring banks without hedging its investments as a perfect microcosm for everything wrong with Wall Street. “The world frigging changed on its axis, and AIG was ground zero for all of it,” he says. “To use a phrase, ‘All of the devils were there.’”

After Fortune laid him off in 2009, he turned his reporting into a book, Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG’s Corporate Suicide, published in 2011. By this point, Boyd and his family had moved to North Carolina, and he had started a blog that eventually grew into SIRF. One of his first targets was Anthony Davian, a hedge-fund manager who was siphoning off thousands of dollars into his own pockets. He ultimately pleaded guilty to 14 counts of fraud and money laundering, and was sentenced to 57 months in prison. In raving about Boyd’s work, the Columbia Journalism Review commented that “this kind of story is enough of a high-wire act when you’ve got a big media corporation and its well-paid legal team behind you. It’s something else when you don’t have that.” But Boyd, the magazine said, “had the reporting nailed down.”

Exposing Pharmaceutical Fraud

More recently, Boyd has turned his attention to the pharmaceutical industry. For one story, he spent countless hours investigating Insys, a drug company producing a late-stage cancer drug called Subsys that led to some complications, including several deaths. Boyd pored over legal and financial filings to reveal a clear pattern in which Subsys was being prescribed by doctors for all kinds of ailments it was never intended to treat, in exchange for cash bribes from the company. “These products were being sold fraudulently and abusively,” he says, “and they were making many more corpses than they were helping people.”

Boyd says he drove himself into debt traveling around the country to talk with patients and their families, but the stories he heard kept him going. “Thousands of people were overdosing on this stuff, and it wasn’t being reported. They were selling something a hundred times more powerful than battlefield morphine and talking about it like it was a hamburger from Hardee’s. I had total moral outrage and conviction that this company was worse than the Mafia.”

When Boyd’s series came out in 2015, the company was rocked by the allegations. Multiple doctors went to jail for their participation in the kickback scheme, and the top executives were arrested.

Over the past five years, Boyd gradually built up his nonprofit through grants of $100,000 to $150,000 a year. This past year, he saw a huge jump to more than $600,000, driven by several large contributions from financial executives, with more than half of that funding coming from Wall Street short-seller Marc Cohodes. His first goal after receiving that money will be to turn his eye back on the financial markets. “I don’t want there to be any suggestion I am getting paid off,” he says, and besides, “there are some damn interesting stories that are largely untold.”

Rape in the Fields

At the time that Bernice Yeung began reporting about rape and sexual harassment in the fields of California, that story was largely untold as well. The story began as a tip from a University of California, Berkeley, student who was doing a summer internship at CIR and had heard about a farmworker who had been forced by her supervisor to have sex with him for years as a condition of keeping her job. That led Yeung and her colleagues to ask a classic journalist’s question: “Was this an isolated incident, or is this part of a larger phenomenon?”

It was a difficult question to answer. After all, Yeung and her fellow reporters couldn’t just go into the fields and start interviewing people. Even if they could find women and men who had experienced sexual abuse, they were likely to be hesitant to talk with strangers. “People don’t want to talk to journalists about this for the same reason they don’t want to report it,” Yeung says. “Shame, self-blame, fear of not being believed. Then you add to that the challenges of immigrant status and poverty.”

Yeung and her colleagues started with a few cases that, against the odds, had been reported to the courts, where documents could help fill in the gaps and offer some corroboration for details. In talking with the women (and a few men), they still had to overcome the barriers to discussing such a taboo subject; oftentimes, they let women choose where they wanted to do the interviews, or talk off the record until they were comfortable. Some interviews led to others, revealing hundreds of cases in which women were raped and abused with impunity by supervisors in the fields. Even when women came forward to report years of abuse, their attackers were rarely prosecuted, and labor contractors who employed them rarely punished.

In talking with subjects, Yeung drew upon the training she’d received at Fordham. She had grown up in San Jose, California, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong who came to work in Silicon Valley. She originally thought she might be a music journalist, but that all changed when as an undergrad at Northwestern she discovered the Innocence Project, which works to free wrongly convicted inmates. “That was a complete game changer for me,” she says. She began doing investigative reporting, moving back to the Bay Area to work at SF Weekly. Even as she wrote about tobacco companies and school funding, she felt she needed a stronger grounding in the topics she was covering.

While reporting on criminal justice issues, she spoke with Fordham sociology professor Jeanne Flavin, Ph.D., and began considering grad school. “It just seemed to fit,” she says. At Fordham, Flavin became her adviser for her thesis, which examined procedural justice, a movement to treat citizens with dignity and respect in the Bronx criminal court. Her sociology training helped her become a better interviewer, she says, by showing her how to think critically about the power dynamics between investigative reporters and vulnerable subjects. “It gave me the vocabulary to think through the thorny ethical issues about how we get informed consent.”

When the documentary Rape in the Fields finally aired in June 2013, it didn’t have an immediate effect. “It was a little of that deafening silence,” Yeung says. At screenings of the film held in farmworker communities, however, she was amazed to see how personally affected many in the audience became. “Women would get up and talk about how they had experienced something similar, and were sharing it publicly for the first time,” she says. As attention built, calls grew to pass legislation to deal with the issue. Finally, in September 2014, California passed a law to require sexual harassment training of all labor contractors, with provisions to revoke the license of contractors who hired supervisors who sexually harassed their workers. “That’s the gold standard,” Yeung says, “when you can affect policy.”

Seizing the MeToo# Moment

Even after that success, Yeung doggedly continued her reporting on sexual violence. When Rape in the Fields aired, she was contacted by an editor from the New Press about the possibility of turning the subject into a book; by that time, Yeung was already on to a new topic, examining sexual abuse among janitorial workers in offices on the night shift. She helped to produce the documentary Rape on the Night Shift while gathering material for the book, In a Day’s Work.

“I think the book was already out of my hands before Weinstein,” she says, referring to the sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein that ignited the #MeToo movement, exposing sexual transgressions by powerful men in media, politics, and the arts. “#MeToo has created this opening, and is not going away,” she says. “I hope that we get to the point where we are not focused purely on reporting after the fact but thinking more about the mechanisms we can put in place to prevent this.”

In a Day’s Work is refreshing in not only focusing on the problem but also weaving in stories of activists and policymakers working to address it. “Investigative journalism can be heavy and, frankly, depressing,” she says. “I wanted to not leave people feeling like they are powerless in the end.”

Yeung is heartened by the resurgence of interest in investigative reporting. She sees a hybrid model of newspapers partnering with nonprofits to pull off complicated, important stories. “I think it is especially important at this moment in time when things seem very polarized and there are all these claims of ‘fake news,’” she says. “The power of investigative reporting is in really digging into a topic, but also providing the necessary context historically, socially, and culturally so we can come away with a better understanding in the end.”

—Michael Blanding is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

That was the conclusion of Helena B. Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and anthropology at New York University, in a March 8 lecture, “White Opioids: Pharmaceuticals, Race, and the War on Drugs That Wasn’t,” at the Rose Hill campus.

Dr. Hansen, whose visit was sponsored by the Center for Ethics Education, argued that the current crisis is partly the result of a stark racial divide: When white Americans become addicted, it’s seen as proof of a breakdown of society, but when minorities become addicted, it’s viewed as evidence of an individual’s moral failing.

This outlook was reflected in the 1980s when penalties for possession of crack were higher than for possession of cocaine, she said. It has continued with the creation, marketing, and distribution of buprenorphine, which is commonly sold under the name Suboxone, a pain killer geared specifically to white, middle class Americans. Dr. Hansen compared it (and its predecessor, Oxycodone) to Methadone, which is distributed in troubled inner-city neighborhoods.

“The current generation of opioids were designed to have white racial identities, and in our stratified health care and justice systems, the biotechnologies and social technologies shaping opioid consumption reinforce racial inequalities, while at the same time harming whites,” she said.

Suboxone has never been explicitly promoted as a white person’s drug, but Dr. Hansen described four “technologies of whiteness”-addiction neuroscience, new biotechnologies, regulatory structures, and marketing-that showed how it was inexorably linked to race.

When it comes to regulatory structures, for instance, she recounted that Congress passed the Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) in 2000, thus enabling physicians to prescribe Suboxone in their offices. The debates leading up to passage focused on a “new kind of drug user,” one that is young, suburban and “not hardcore”: implicitly, white.

“Alan Leshner, then director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, testified that [Suboxone] is uniquely appropriate for a new kind of opioid user, as opposed to Methadone- ‘which tends to be concentrated in urban areas, and is a poor fit for the suburban spread of narcotic addiction,'” she said.

The solution to keeping [Suboxone] out of illicit markets-an eight-hour certification course that doctors are required to take in order to prescribe it-has further made it scarce for minorities.

“Public-sector doctors tell me that the certification requirement is a major barrier to making [Suboxone] available to low income people, as public clinics do not provide time or incentives to pursue certification,” she said, “while prescribers in the private sector can charge fees of up to $1,000 for an initial visit for [Suboxone] induction,” she said.

This sort of racial targeting has actually hurt whites as much as it has hurt minorities, she said. It has led to implicit assumptions that whites are not as susceptible to addiction-even as Oxycontin addiction rates among whites have climbed, due to a ten-fold increase in prescription opioids nationally, “with the disproportionate uptake by prescribers in white suburban and rural areas.”

In the long run, Dr. Hansen expressed hope that this current moment of despair over white deaths will spur efforts to transform America’s health care system into one that’s less market driven and more equitable.

“Our predominant frame for addiction in this country has-until recently-been that it’s an individual, moral character problem . . . [that]people are making bad choices, they’re just not strong enough, or perhaps they come from bad families with bad values,” she said.

“Americans are beginning to realize that maybe addiction is related to our economic system and the social networks that people don’t now have.”