In 2020, the FDA began requiring benzodiazepines to be labeled with a warning that physical dependence can occur within days or weeks and that stopping them abruptly can lead to life-threatening seizures. Celebrities such as Chance the Rapper and Justin Bieber have spoken openly about their addiction to another benzo, Xanax. Benzo-related deaths have increased 10-fold in the US in the past 20 years and medical professionals still overprescribe these kinds of drugs.

Bond’s dogged self-analysis is like a skewer through her own heart — and ours.

Writing her book, “Blood Orange Night: My Journey to the Edge of Madness,, was a way, she said, of informing a larger audience of people about the side effects of benzodiazepines — which Bond called the next big drug epidemic of which people are not aware.

[Bond] works so hard to right the leaning tower of her life that we cannot help but think of her as a heroic figure. It is her distinctive honesty and candor that will make her a heroine you will not soon forget.

In her propulsive, poetic memoir, Blood Orange Night, Bond narrates her experience in harrowing detail, determined to speak for "others like me slipping into the dark" of addiction to prescribed drugs.