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Sunny’s Story Written by Ginger Katz CEO and Founder, the Courage to Speak® Foundation If only. If only our pet could talk – could warn us we’d lose our son to drugs. This is Sunny’s Story. It looks deceptively like a children’s book when, in fact it’s for everyone who loves someone who might become addicted. Sunny’s Story is narrated through the eyes, ears and mind of Sunny, the family beagle, and tells of the ups and downs of his life with his young master, from the moment they met at an animal shelter to Sunny’s anguished yelps watching his best friend succumb to drugs.
Written by Ginger Katz, a mother who lost her son Ian to a drug overdose, Sunny’s Story helps families talk openly about the dangers of drugs. The Story “My name is Sunny. I’m a white, brown and black Beagle with short legs and long ears that blow in the wind when I run. I live with Ginger and Larry in a house by the ocean. We are all very sad because once we had the best boy in the world. His name was Ian, and this is the story of how he was taken from us. When I was a puppy I had to go to the animal shelter to find a family…” Ms. Katz tells her son Ian’s story through the family’s soulful beagle and Ian’s special friend. Sunny is a perceptive non-human narrator with very human feelings and a gentle buffer that allows young readers the necessary distance needed to deal with this difficult subject. Sunny gives us all a message of hope, which led to the founding of the Courage to Speak® Foundation. Sunny’s Story is meant to be read at the dinner table, in schools, libraries, as part of the Courage to Speak® Drug Prevention Curriculum and as a stand alone book for elementary, middle and high school students.
Comments: “They loved reading about Ian’s life, finding the signs where his life began to go astray, and culminating in how he could have avoided his outcome.” Ellen Seltzer (Connecticut) 6th grade teacher “This book is an important and unique addition to the list of preventive tools so necessary for children in today’s world.” Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Professor of Practice and Associate Dean, Harvard School of Public Health “Sunny’s Story is a part of our sixth grade reading literacy curriculum. This book is a must have for schools and for families.” Dr. Lynne Moore, Principal, West Rocks Middle School, Norwalk CT ‘I bought copies (Sunny’s Story) for my grandchildren and I believe it encouraged my 16 year-old granddaughter to admit to her father- who was in total denial at the time- that she might be addicted to drugs. She admitted she was stealing pain pills from his medicine cabinet and buying Oxycontin and other drugs at her high school. He then woke up and sent her to a long-term rehab facility; she appears to be OK- for now.” D.R. – Grandfather
Elaine Walters the author of The Cannabis Connection and Marijuana - An Australian Crisis, completes the trilogy on the issue of illegal drugs with the publication of The Cruel Hoax - Street Drugs in Australia.
The Cannabis Connection gives a clear concise account of she effects of Marijuana. Elaine Walters believes the character and force of she present drug epidemic has been misinterpreted by many Australian ‘experts.’ This has resulted in ineffective policies, inadequate drug education in schools and renewed debate on legalization.
A helpful book … 
“A manifesto on addiction by a truth-telling psychiatrist who explodes conventional wisdom. With customary wit and literary forays into Coleridge and De Quincey, Dalrymple turns his raw experience into gems of clinical insight. Addicts are not passive, nor are they diseased; but they have managed, Dairymple argues, to seduce a vast treatment bureaucracy into regarding them as medical victims.” 
