Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Prologue
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of cocaine and crack. But the opioid epidemic began in exactly the
opposite manner, grabbing a toehold in isolated Appalachia, Midwest-
ern rust belt counties, and rural Maine. Working-class families who
were traditionally dependent on jobs in high-risk industries to pay
their bills—coal mining in southwest Virginia, steel milling in western
Pennsylvania, logging in Maine—weren’t just the first to experience
the epidemic of drug overdose; they also happened to live in politically
unimportant places, hollows and towns and fishing villages where the
treatment options were likely to be hours from home.
Jesse Bolstridge was born in the mid-1990s, when opioid addiction
first took root. His short life represents the arc of the epidemic’s toll,
the apex of which is nowhere close to being reached.
If I could retrace the epidemic as it shape-shifted across the spine
of the Appalachians, roughly paralleling Interstate 81 as it fanned out
from the coalfields and crept north up the Shenandoah Valley, I could
understand how prescription pill and heroin abuse was allowed to fes-
ter, moving quietly and stealthily across this country, cloaked in stigma
and shame.
Set in three culturally distinct communities that represent the evolu-
tion of the epidemic as I reported it, Dopesick begins in the coalfields,
in the hamlet of St. Charles, Virginia, in the remote westernmost
corner of the state, largely with the introduction of the painkiller Oxy-
Contin in 1996.
From there, the scourge not only advanced into new territories but
also arrived via a different delivery system, as the morphine molecule
shifted from OxyContin and other painkillers like Vicodin and Perco-
cet to heroin, the pills’ illicit twin, and, later, even stronger synthetic
analogs.
As the epidemic gained strength, it sent out new geographic shoots,
moving from predominantly rural areas to urban and suburban set-
tings, though the pattern was never stable or fixed. Heroin landed in
the suburbs and cookie-cutter subdivisions near my home in Roanoke
in the mid-2000s. But it wasn’t widely acknowledged until a promi-
nent jeweler and civic leader, Ginger Mumpower, drove her addicted
son to the federal prison where he would spend the next five years, for
his role in a former classmate’s overdose death.
I covered Spencer Mumpower’s transition from private-school stu-
dent to federal inmate at the same time I witnessed the rise in overdose
deaths spread north along I-81 from Roanoke. It infected pristine farm
pastures and small northern Shenandoah Valley towns, as more users,
and increasingly vigilant medical and criminal justice systems, pro-
pelled the addicted onto the urban corridor from Baltimore to New
York. If you live in a city, maybe you’ve seen the public restroom with
a sharps container, or witnessed a librarian administer Narcan.
While more and more Americans die of drug overdose, it is impos-
sible to not look back at the early days of what we now recognize as
an epidemic and wonder what might have been done to slow or stop
it. Kristi Fernandez’s questions are not hers alone. Until we understand
how we reached this place, America will remain a country where get-
ting addicted is far easier than securing treatment.
The worst drug epidemic in American history didn’t land in the bu-
colic northern Shenandoah Valley until 2012, when Ronnie Jones, a
twice-convicted drug dealer from the Washington suburbs, arrived in
the back of a Virginia Department of Corrections van and set about
turning a handful of football players, tree trimmers, and farmers’ kids
who used pills recreationally into hundreds of heroin addicts, as police
officers told the story.
The transition here, in the quiet town of Woodstock, was driven by
the same twisted math I’d witnessed elsewhere, as many users began
with prescriptions, then resorted to buying heroin from dealers and
selling portions of their supply to fuel their next purchase. Because the
most important thing for the morphine-hijacked brain is, always, not
to experience the crushing physical and psychological pain of with-
drawal: to avoid dopesickness at any cost.
To feed their addictions, many users recruit new customers. Who
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you might have seen on a circus poster, a word derived from the Ger-
man for “heroic” and bracketed by a swirling ribbon frame: heroin.
It was sold widely from drugstore counters, no prescription necessary,
not only for veterans but also for women with menstrual cramps and
babies with hiccups.
Outside Woodstock, I pass George’s Chicken, the poultry-
processing plant where Ronnie Jones first arrived to work in a Depart-
ment of Corrections work-release program, clad in prison-issue khakis.
I pass the house nearby where a cop I know spent days, nights, and
weekends crouched under a bedroom window, surveilling Jones and
his co-workers from behind binoculars—a fraction of the man-hours
the government invested in putting members of Jones’s heroin ring be-
hind bars.
I head northwest toward West Virginia, the crumbling landscape
like so many of the distressed towns I’ve already traversed in Virginia
some four hundred miles south, down to the same hillary for prison
signs and the same Confederate flags waving presciently from their
posts.
At the prison, I park my car and walk through the heavy front door.
A handler named Rachel ushers me through security, making cheer-
ful small talk as we head deeper inside the concrete maze and through
three different sets of locked doors, her massive cluster of keys rever-
berating like chimes at each checkpoint.
We pass through a recreation area, where several men—all but one
of the prisoners black and brown, I can’t help noticing—push mops
and brooms around the cavernous room, looking up and nodding as
we pass. The manufactured air inside is cold, and it smells of Clorox.
Ronnie Jones is already waiting for me on the other side of the last
locked door, seated at a table. He looks thinner and older than he
did in his mug shot, his prison khakis baggy, his trim Afro and beard
flecked with gray. He looks tired, and the whites of his eyes are tinged
with red.
He rises from the chair to shake my hand, then sits back down, his
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hands folded into a steeple, his elbows resting on the table between us.
His mood is unreadable.
The glassed-in room is beige, the floors are beige, and so is Rachel,
in her beige-and-blue uniform and no-nonsense shoes, the kind you
could run in if you had to. She tells us to knock on the window if we
need her, then leaves for her perch in the rec room, on the other side
of the window, the door lock clicking decisively behind her.
I open my notebook, situate the questions I’ve prepared off to the
side, next to my spare pens. I’m thinking of Kristi and Ginger and of
Tess’s mom, and what Jones might say that will explain the fate of these
mothers’ kids.
Jones leans forward, expectant and unsmiling, and rubs his hands to-
gether, as if we’re business associates sitting down to hammer out a deal.
Then he takes a deep breath and, relaxing back into his chair, he
waits for me to start.
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