AUDIO – AND LIVED TO TELL THE TALE –
July 20, 2025 – Brian Rehn has lost 60 friends to drug addiction. At 42 years old, he has attended far more funerals than weddings.
“It’s weird to be the ones still left standing,” he said. “A lot of our lifelong friends have died.” The book tells their stories living with addiction in the Atlanta suburbs, an area called the “heroin triangle,” during the 1990s, and how the addiction and loss they experienced have followed them into adulthood. In 2018, A&E’s documentary “Intervention” aired an eight-episode series titled “The Heroin Triangle.” The series followed drug addicts in Marietta, Powder Springs and Atlanta and painted a disturbing portrait of our suburbs awash in drugs. Released in April, “Young Firecrackers” tells the story of Brian Rehn, Ryan Bernstein, Andrew Theriot, Ashley Mercurio and Brooke Graham, and sheds light on the horrors of drug addiction.
Graduates of Pope High School in east Cobb, the co-authors have known one another since age 14. Though they split up for college, their friendship remains strong today. For Rehn and his co-authors, they first had a friend die from drugs at 19.
“It hit our group really hard and shook the Marietta area,” Rehn said.
Rehn said that during the throes of the opioid epidemic, the community “turned a blind eye” to its drug problem.
“You can’t act like it’s not happening,” he said. “It was the last thing anyone wanted to address. No one wanted to look at themselves in the mirror and see what’s actually happening in the area, and an avalanche of hundreds of lives lost to drugs came from that.”
