Opioids and Organs

A heartwrenching memoir of a daughter losing her father and a scathing indictment of the medical industry.Arizona grieves at the hospital bed of her father, a man she hardly knew, brain dead after a fentanyl overdose.Doctors encourage her to act quickly to recast him as a hero by way of organ donations.Distraught, Arizona makes a decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life.As she struggles to come to terms with her father s death and her role as next of kin in making his life s last decision, she uncovers inconvenient truths about the organ industry s own codependence on the opioid crisis.Her parents were bohemian wild kids of 90s Montreal.He was a talented skateboarder, charming guitarist, and visual artist.She was an aspiring writer and outcast. They lived with other teenagers in the Plateau in a messy apartment filled with drugs, alcohol, and black-market animals.The city s macabre history McGill Medical School, the Mount Royal Cemetery, ancient cadavers at the Maude Abbott Medical Museum takes center stage as Arizona sorts out fact from fiction.Opioids and Organs is a damning critique of an industry that takes advantage of society s outcasts.It is also the graphic novel debut of O Neil herself, who weaves together a dramatic personal history with that of how humanity made its scientific advances.A muted yet striking pastel palette and a doll-like fantastical elegance belie both the gruesomeness of the book s topic and the rage of its author.