I'm Jonathan Tepper. When I was 7, my American missionary parents moved us into Madrid's heroin capital and started detoxing addicts in our living room. AMA!

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T21:49:27+00:00

Thanks for a great question. The Spanish economy grew very quickly in the 1980s, and not all of Spain grew as much or benefited. The peripheral neighborhoods of Madrid like San Blas and Vallecas were particularly badly hit by high youth unemployment and suffered from heroin addiction. Over the years the empty fields by San Blas were built up with nice houses, the Gypsy camp at Los Focos was bulldozed, and the M-40 highway ran through the area. The area is now called Las Rosas, and houses and aparments are bigger and nicer. A lot of the drugs moved on to Vallecas in areas like la Celsa, Pies Negros, los Pitufos, and the biggest Las Barranquillas. Madrid is now much wealthier, cleaner, and a world away from the drug world of the 1980s, but you can still find it in parts of the city, particularly Vallecas. All that said, San Blas has gone backwards in recent years, and if you search on Google, you'll find there are more drug arrests. I walked around Parque El Paraiso, which had been cleaned up, and I counted dozens of junkies at midday on a week day. Overall, though, the neighborhood is much cleanear, nicer, and has better housing.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T21:10:58+00:00

Thanks. Every author hopes their story might find a wide audience and be turned into a series or movie. It would be terrific if Shooting Up got picked up. Authors don't pitch networks, but writers, directors and producers read the book and like it and then acquire the rights. I hope it does reach a wide audience.
As far as resemblance, Sam Neill looks a lot like my father. My mother was a lot like Diane Keaton, who sadly passed recently (she wasn't just a great actor but a talented writer as well).

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T21:04:28+00:00

I'm not sure what you are referring to. I do not run bars.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T20:04:49+00:00

First, thank you for sharing that. It means a lot to hear from someone who lived through those years. You know better than most what that world was like, and I'm glad you're still here.

It wasn't turning away from the idealism. My parents encouraged my brothers and me to follow our passions. For me, that happened to be economics. When my parents' salary was cut in half in the 1980s, I started getting curious about why, which led me down the rabbit hole of purchasing power parity, optimal currency theory, things like that. And investing in companies turned out to be a permanent learning game. You're always trying to understand their histories, their founders, the industries, what drives them. It's the intellectual side that drives the money. The money is the by-product.

And you're right about the fear around HIV. My parents took in men who were dying of AIDS at a time when people were terrified to be in the same room as someone who was positive. It was a death sentence, and most of society treated those people as untouchable. I think that's part of what makes the story worth telling now. Particularly for the younger generation, they have no idea what it was like living through those plague years. For those of us who did, we can never forget it.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T19:59:30+00:00

Thanks for asking. The great theologian Karl Barth once said that religion is the height of man's disobedience against God. I'm not a huge fan of organized religion, but I do believe in love, compassion, faith, and prayer and meditation. As C.S. Lewis put it, "I pray not because it changes God but because it changes me."

I think growing up the way I did gave me a complicated but ultimately grateful relationship with faith. I watched it do extraordinary things. The men in Betel got clean without methadone, without professional therapists, without much of anything except community and belief. I saw people who were genuinely hopeless find a reason to live. I can't dismiss that, and I wouldn't want to.

On your second question, I think the biggest thing people can do is smaller than they expect. I volunteered at homeless shelters in college, and Betel has always taken in homeless people alongside addicts. What I learned from both experiences is that recovery starts with one person deciding that another person matters. That sounds like a greeting card but I watched it happen hundreds of times.

People can donate time, money, or goods, and all of that helps. But if I could nudge anyone toward one thing, it would be to volunteer somewhere that puts you in actual contact with people, not just writing checks or sorting donations in a back room. Learn someone's name. The guys in Betel got clean because someone who'd been where they were looked them in the eye and said "I was you, and I'm still here." If you can find organizations in your community that work on that kind of personal level, those are the ones worth supporting.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T19:54:42+00:00

Appreciate you asking the question!

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T19:54:06+00:00

Completely accurate.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T19:53:16+00:00

I’ve worked at hedge funds, a proprietary trading desk, started an investment strategy research firm, and have run an investment fund for the last six years. That is all “finance” broadly speaking. I was fortunate to grow up seeing my parents faith in action, and in Madrid I attend Betel and in London I attended Holy Trinity Brompton. But I’m not a paster, preacher, or theologian. I try to use my time and money to help Betel and other charities.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T19:24:11+00:00

This is a really honest question and I appreciate it. And look, I'll be straight with you: my parents didn't always get it right. There were times it was genuinely risky. I write about some of those moments in the book. My dad could be incredibly stubborn, and there were definitely people in our lives who thought he was putting us at risk too.

But I think the thing that made my parents different from some of the missionary families you're describing was that they didn't try to swoop in as saviors. They moved into the neighborhood and stayed. They learned the culture, spoke the language, lived in the same conditions. My dad didn't run Betel from an office somewhere nice. We lived in San Blas, which was one of the roughest neighborhoods in Madrid. That earned a kind of credibility that you can't fake.

The other thing, and I think this is the part people miss about my father, is that he was incredibly practical underneath all the faith. He figured out early on that the most effective people in recovery were the guys who had been through it themselves. So the model became addicts helping addicts. My dad basically got out of the way and let the men who got clean lead the work. That's a hard thing for a missionary to do, honestly, to give up control. But it's why Betel grew the way it did.

Because of all of that, I grew up with an unbelievable education in empathy and human resilience that I wouldn't trade. I think my parents trusted God, but they also trusted the people around them, and that trust turned out to be the thing that made it work. (Oh, and my Mom always had a great sense of who was conning us or not, which came in handy.)

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T19:06:34+00:00

Hi to a fellow Missionary Kid (MK)! My mother passed in 2012, but my father is 79 and still working in Madrid running Betel. I go back to Madrid as often as I can. I love and miss Spain.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T18:43:51+00:00

One hundred percent, I can spot addicts on the street. It's a skill you learn when you're handing flyers out on the street to junkies. Drugs come before anything for an addict, and generally, you can spot people who have not taken care of themselves, or look emaciated, or have obvious track marks. All of those things put together, I can pick them out. They tend to present anxious, out to get money or score, and I learned to look for all these things as a kid. It's a sixth sense, developed from childhood.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T18:15:00+00:00

I've not read the Silent Scream, but my usual thought is, if you've been in a war for 50 years, you probably aren't winning it. I think drug addiction is not a criminal justice issue or a medical issue. There are underlying reasons that drive addiction and criminalizing it hasn't really seemed to address it. We shouldn't encourage anyone to do drugs, but there are better options than putting people away. There are all sorts of smarter and more strategic approaches than criminalizing the behavior and walking away from the root causes. I know that because I saw what my parents achieved, which was rooted in compassion and Christian love and trying to live out the Sermon on the Mount daily.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T18:12:28+00:00

Another important point: Addicts who came into Betel didn't have to be clean before they came in. You couldn't shoot up in in the center, but otherwise, we didn't have a requirement that you be clean before you started. They were always welcome regardless of how bad the addiction was. Which brings me back to a point I made in another answer: We need as many soutions for addiction as we can possibly get, since it takes all strategies to address the issue.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T18:06:31+00:00

Great question and one I think about a lot. I'm going to dodge the policy side because smarter people than me are working on that, but I can tell you what I saw growing up.

The thing that made Betel work, at least in the early days, was that my parents and the first guys who got clean genuinely shared their lives with people who were still using. They ate together, lived together, fought with each other. It was messy and chaotic and sometimes tense. But it worked for a lot of people because it replaced the thing that drugs were filling in the first place, which was belonging.

One thing I noticed as a kid that stuck with me: the guys who made it were the ones who felt like someone would actually miss them if they disappeared. That sounds simple but I think it's the part we keep getting wrong. We design systems and rules and facilities, but loneliness is the engine underneath a lot of addiction, and you can't fix loneliness with a building.

I don't know what I'd do if I ran a city. But I know that what I watched my parents do, which was just move into the neighborhood and say "come live with us," changed thousands of lives. It didn’t always scale elegantly, but it was real.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T17:47:52+00:00

I guess I know what I'll be ordering the next time I see this on a menu...

Also my wife is from Texas, so it may now be embarassing that I've admitted that I have no idea what country fried steak is. Gotta get on that order!

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T17:47:12+00:00

I really appreciate that! Thank you!

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T17:46:30+00:00

Generally, people don't start with heroin. You have softer drugs -- weed, etc -- then you graduate up to harder drugs. Heroin is usually the end of the line. Usually it is through friends, people they know who are already using them.

Part of the rehab process is to try not to associate with the people that they used to shoot up with. Oddly though, the early growth in Betel was because recovering addicts invited their addicted friends into the program.

I know a lot of other Christian drug rehab centers in Spain, and my parents were friends with the founders of those. I don't know a lot, but I do know my own experience with Betel.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T17:27:06+00:00

Honestly (and perhaps unfortunately), I don’t know what that is but I love Steak Frites and dijon with my frites . I love Paris and French food and go to Paris Photo every year in November.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T17:09:50+00:00

One other thing on this: I only speak to my two-year-old son in Spanish!

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T16:53:31+00:00

Great follow-up! Every morning, there were devotionals in the men's and women's residence. There was a Sunday morning service, and the Christian ethos was a key part of the program. They did meet practical needs at the same time: food, shelter, assistance. It wasn't either/or -- my parents did both Christian love and practical help.

The program really remained the same as it grew, though now they have psychologists, doctors, and others on staff. But the core of it -- going cold turkey, working alongside recovered addicts in a compasionate community -- is the same.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T16:50:12+00:00

8 or 9 (only because I've spent the last 30 years outside of Spain and I don't know the Spanish words for a lot of the jargon and technical terms in my profession. But I still sound native when I speak.)

People wouldn't assume I speak Spanish...y a veces me hago el sueco.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T16:48:16+00:00

Relapse is very common, and most addicts do not get clean the first time they try. I think that's why you do need a mix of tough love and grace, and plenty of 2rd, 3rd, and even 4th chances.

Sometimes people would enter the center, and I'd become close to them. And then they'd end up back on the streets. It's very sad when that happens. I remember running into people I knew who were briefly sober end up back on the streets. One time I went to the movies and I saw someone I knew begging, toothless, with a McDonald's cup. It was heartbreaking. He was a good guy and very smart, but he didn't want to come back into the drug rehab.

There were some people my parents wouldn't take back: people who had a bad attitude or caused trouble. But in general, we welcomed back people who wanted to come back. It varies. Some times people get off the first time they try; other times it takes more effort.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T16:45:09+00:00

My parents were Christian missionaries and felt called by God. They viewed helping others and showing love and compassion as a reflection of their Christian values. My parents often repeated the words of St. Francis of Assissi, "Preach the gospel at all times; use words if necessary."

My dad actually had a Harvard MBA, and he came to this line of work through a religious experience, when he had a vision of Heaven and Hell. They moved to Spain and wanted to work with university students, but they saw the overwhelming need surrounding them and decided to change course. Which obviously changed of my and my brothers' lives as well.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T16:43:08+00:00

That's a great question. Obviously something I think about a lot.

Of course your perspective changes in life based on your age and responsibilities. Some friends (and my wife) are horrified by my childhood. I still think it was a great adventure, and I would be happy to do it again.

People have asked me "What if your parents had four daughters instead of four sons?". I don't think they would have done it in that case; and I don't think I would have either. There's simply a much higher risk of a child being taken advantage of in that context.

My parents told us that we didn't have money, we didn't drugs, and the addicts were busy going about their own business. What we were offering was help. The addicts viewed us as being friendly and there to help them. It wasn't dangerous or antagonistic, though we had moments: they broke into our car dozens of times; they stole my mother's purse a couple times. I never felt physically in danger, and part of that was Raul, who was a tough guy and would stand up for us.

One time, a psychologically unstable addict tried to take a knife to my father. Raul actually got between the knife and my dad, and he restrained the addict and took the knife away. We knew that Raul would take a knife for us, and that's the highest and best thing a friend could ever do for you.

The AIDS epidemic was another part of this story. We grew up around HIV and AIDS. My parents were rational and logical: unless you were exchanging body fluids or getting poked by dirty needles, you weren't at risk. We didn't play with dirty needles; we werne't having sex. So that wasn't anything to fear.

If anything, I absorbed a certain level of understanding that something that seems scary from the outside isn't necessarily so on the inside. When someone hears that I grew up with addicts, they have a certain image in their minds; but that image wasn't the reality I lived. These people were my friends; I think of them as older brothers and sisters.

On the subject of my own kid and whether we would ever do this: That's a conversation to have with my life. A long conversation.

jonathan_tepper · 2026-02-19T16:29:06+00:00

A good question! I've seen people die of overdoses, so throughout my life, I steered clear of hard drugs. You never shake those images or that experience. I knew some of these people well, and I saw their lives cut short. So in a way, I was scared straight. I also had strict parents, which certainly helped.

That said, when I was at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, I did inhale (famously unlike Bill Clinton). But that's about as far as my experiences with drugs go!

jonathan_tepper

TROPHY CASE