Season 9

Heroin abuse in Chicago, especially along a specific area of the Eisenhower Expressway, is examined by focusing on the stories of four people struggling with addiction. Learn how "Heroin Highway" came to be and how people like Kesha, who is newly sober, are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives wrecked by heroin. You will also meet Josh, a man checking into detox yet again to fight his addition, and Matt, who hopes to stay clean while waiting for a bed in a halfway house.

Scioto County, Ohio, is on the DEA list of top 10 places for prescription pill trafficking. The county has seen a 360 percent increase in fatal drug overdoses, with nine of every 10 of those deaths attributable to prescription painkillers. Dealers gets their pills from "pill mills," cash-only clinics that dispense prescription painkillers in mass quantities. We show how prescription drugs, especially "Hillbilly Heroin," the street name for Oxycodone, are devastating the region, and take viewers inside the pill mills with undercover cameras to expose the deadly business.

We go to the Nexus Recovery Center in Dallas, Tex., to follow the gripping stories of four women who are struggling with both addiction and motherhood.

A talkative, eccentric, antiques collector, Michael, 52, was a military brat who moved with his family all over Europe and the U.S. But what he really wanted was a stable, loving home. After a series of traumatic events, Michael began to do drugs, and now he's a rambling, self-loathing addict. Even worse, his two sons have become his using buddies.

Tiffany is a 19-year-old, doe-eyed, innocent looking young woman who shuns motherhood to trek to the seediest parts of Baltimore to score heroin while her family tries to pray the devil out of her.

At a teen, Jamie did drugs and abused alcohol to deal with her traumatic upbringing. At 21, she turned to the church and got sober, but then the fatal overdose of her twin sister triggered a relapse. Now Jamie suffers from alcohol-induced pancreatitis and has suicidal tendencies.

Once happy-go-lucky, Megan, 25, is now a volatile drug addict who scares her family with her unchecked anger. A child of neglect, Megan is now enabled and financed by her guilt-ridden mother. She spends her days drinking and smoking crack. How will Megan react when confronted by her family in an intervention they believe is needed to save her life?

An ambitious inventor and entrepreneur, Benny once dreamed of becoming a millionaire. But stress, drugs, and alcohol have turned his dream into a nightmare. Worst of all, he is no longer a dependable father to his six-year-old daughter. Benny, now 38 and living with his mother, has seen his relationship with his family reach the breaking point, and only an intervention can save him now.

Jenna enjoys caring for abandoned animals because of her own traumatic childhood. When she was four she and her siblings moved in with a very strict step father who believed in corporal punishment. Now Jenna steals and deals drugs to support her IV heroin habit. Can Jenna and her siblings overcome their past to work together as a family and get Jenna into treatment?

As a youngster, Jimbo was humiliated when his mother had an affair. After a knee injury, Jimbo was prescribed painkillers, which numbed both his physical pain and his anger. He now spends his days snorting drugs and flying into rages that have terrorized his family and community. Can an intervention stop this small-town menace?

Cassie, 22, is a crack and oxycodone addict who was abandoned by her mother and raised by her father and his string of wives. At 13, she was sent to an overseas behavior modification school that offered her little more than imprisonment and abuse.

A heroin addict, Jimmy was raised by an alcoholic father. He joined a gang at 13 and was soon on drugs. The birth of Jimmy's son prompted him to try to get clean, but when things got tough with his new family, he began abusing methadone. Now Jimmy's addiction has him close to death.

Erin is a strong-willed Texan who relies on her good looks to get what she wants, which is meth. Erin got tired of being a mother and wife and began a drug-induced party lifestyle. Now Erin's marriage is in pieces and her daughter has been sent to live with relatives. Can an intervention tame this wild Texas girl?

Michelle, a lesbian, was abandoned by her father at age three, molested by a stranger at five, and ridiculed in middle school for her skin color. The love of her life left her when she decided to become a man. Now Michelle is struggling with heroin and desperately needs an intervention. When Austin's stepfather died from alcoholism, he turned to alcohol himself to numb the pain. His girlfriend is now pregnant, and he's doing as much partying as he can before his child is born. Austin needs an intervention to become a sober dad and break his family's cycle of alcoholism.

Once a football player with a bright future, Darick dropped out of school to get married when his girlfriend got pregnant. Darick loved being a father, but when his marriage ended, Darick learned his daughter was not his biological child, and he was denied all contact with her.

A drug addict living on the streets, Rachel uses her "street kid" lifestyle to defy society and her father, with whom she's had a strained relationship since her parents' divorce. Rachel started experimenting with cocaine and meth at 14, and using heroin at 16.