Triumphs and Tragedies: A True Story of Wealth and Addiction

Karl McMillen, Jr., deserved a piece of the Pacific paradise. He'd plumbed his way up from screw-fittings and sweat into mega-business ownership and multi-millions. He'd earned the azure-awesome view that he woke to every magical morning. And he'd earned the ideal family at his side. A dynamic wife and two bright, talented sons with sky's-the-limit potential.

But that storm...

He never saw it coming. It hit hard and it hit fast. The grinding gales of addiction ripped apart everything he had.

How do you go from planning exotic family vacations and evaluating real estate investments to planning prison visits and evaluating rehab centers and criminal defense pleas? How do you watch your surfer-champion sons transform into drug lords? Inmates? How do you watch your entire family die, one by one?

And yet never stop fighting.

What does it take to look in the mirror and search for the meaning of enabler? To face that you're sacrificing your own livelihood for Scotch? To ride a sheer, pounding wave of triumphs and tragedies, and then pull out and paddle back for more?

It takes a rare and special person: Karl McMillen.

Triumphs and Tragedies opens with a feral panorama of early twentieth century California; a last-gasp look at the West before it was "settled." When hard work was still a fundamental, and "entitlement" just meant you were entitled to work your tail off. Karl's success epitomizes that the cleanest hands in business are the ones that smeared the most elbow grease on their way up. Karl worked, and the system worked. Karl was said to have the "Golden Touch."

But some systems break down; especially social systems. California and all of America changed as the wild wave of the 1960s swept so much of the country's youth into the deep murkiness of drugs. Plenty of adults were plunged into realms over their heads, too. Karl encountered something his never-say-die work ethic and Golden Touch could not conquer: Addiction.

But Karl fought to apply his abilities to this strange new subject. Working hard now meant gathering data about the destructive force of drugs and analyzing treatments. It was a task he had the unique mental resolve and physical resources to undertake. And he uncovered so much.

Triumphs and Tragedies: A True Story of Wealth and Addiction explores the down-and-dirty psychology of addiction through live "voices from the street." It probes the essence of enabling and the value of "rehabs" neither of which were common concepts in the sixties. It chronicles top-of-the-world success juxtaposed against a downside of life no one should have to abide. A side which proves that some things, money cannot buy.