Today’s heroin emergency mandates bringing these principles from courtrooms to living rooms quickly. Recovery is a process, not an event. Film can show it best. This one-pager is a rapid summary of TAKIN’ BACK THE STREETS. It ignores regular grammar rules to provide a larger overview.
Author Tim McCarthy successfully pioneered Drug Court, the nation’s most successful court drug treatment program. Transferring this information from courtrooms to living rooms required an action drama:
Father Maximilian Kolbe, son of a millionaire, turns down a cushy, chancery office appointment to work in a drug-infested city parish. When Angela West shows up at his church just having escaped from a heroin party, where she witnessed a ritualistic murder, Father Max realizes that the terrified addict has stumbled into a heretofore legendary place known as “The Museum of Death.”
Understanding that the head of the drug cartel is in his own backyard, Father Max teams up with recovering addict, Phil McGuire, now a Parole Agent. Phil, who owes Father Max his life, runs the largest Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Baltimore City.
Together this valiant pair assemble recovering local addicts and explain that they have techniques and devices at their disposal that the drug lords cannot match. They’re ready to wage war against them if they can join forces with the recovering addicts, who they dub The Guadalupe Guardians. They won’t buy drugs and are determined to “throw the bums out.”
Realizing that Father Max is shielding Angela and that his Guardians have threatened their entire operation, the dealers try to shoot Max off of his altar, but he is saved by Police Officer Wynant. Undaunted, the dealers burn McGuire’s home to ashes and kidnap Angela’s mother, Mrs. West.
Despite being forbidden by Wynant to take renegade action, and despite being forbidden by the code of recovering addicts not to get involved romantically for at least one year, McGuire and Angela, in order to save Angela’s mother, embark upon a doubly dangerous trail into the Museum of Death.
Although Angela was blindfolded when taken to the “heroin party,” she and McGuire believe that is where her mother has been taken. With help from the recovering community, they are able to locate the mansion. Both risk death but Angela uses her Tae Kwon Do skills to flatten the opposition while McGuire rescues Angela’s mother.
As it turns out, this will not be their final visit to this mansion of depravity because Father Max is brought there to die, and they must rescue him before the man who saved them both is murdered.