Dreamland (20 page)

RAP put together a mentor system: An addict leaving jail while detoxing would meet a former addict who took him to get housing and food, and help him avoid old friends and situations. With that, and given the enormous numbers of new addicts created by the cheap and reliable supply of the Xalisco Boys’ heroin, “the sheer numbers of people getting sober skyrocketed” as well, Blackburn said.

Many joined RAP. They spoke openly of their addiction. They orchestrated large meetings with elected officials designed to maneuver politicians into supporting increased funding for, say, recovery housing. RAPsters spoke with a special urgency about heroin overdose. They could see what others had not: that heroin overdose deaths were surging on the streets. Their friends were dying and they cast around for a politician to listen.

One who did was Multnomah County commissioner Sharron Kelley. Thus Gary Oxman ended up in 1999 with the task of studying and explaining the county’s raging bout of heroin overdoses, which was something, as it turned out, that Oxman at first could not find at all.

During these years, a California transplant named Kim Ellis was badly addicted to heroin. Xalisco Boys were everywhere, blending in to Portland’s growing Latino immigrant community. She never knew where they were from. She called them worker bees—the guys who delivered her heroin whenever she called. Some of them she got to know.

“We’re everywhere,” one told her. “As soon as I go home to Mexico, there’s my brothers and my cousin waiting to come up and take my place.”

Most drivers were between seventeen and thirty years of age. To poor Mexicans like them, the image of America included money, big cars, the Dallas Cowboys, Bruce Willis movies, McDonald’s, and, especially, American girls. But they worked every day and hibernated in bare apartments at night. All they were ever going to know of the great and mythical United States was what they saw delivering heroin. The only girls Xalisco drivers were going to meet were their female junkie customers. They were farm boys, not thugs or cartel killers. They were polite, raised among the conservative traditions of the Mexican small town, and awed by America. They never used their product and some of them were sweet and courteous.

For female junkies, hardened by daily exposure to the worst of human nature, this occasional dose of tender attention was welcome. “Every single guy I encountered, they were personable guys,” Ellis said. “It came to the point where there was a human element, a relationship that started. Once I was in the car I no longer saw them as people who were making money helping me with my demise. They were just people. When it was time to get clean I missed that relationship. It became really hard to hate them.”

This was part of why the Xalisco Boys succeeded. To their customers, many Xalisco Boys were not like typical heroin dealers, who were addicts as well, cold and conniving. Some of the boys became friendly with their addict customers. Even through the language barrier, they were personable, sometimes charming.

Empathy for her Xalisco dealers made it doubly difficult for Ellis to kick heroin, which she did years later. “In order to kick, I had to hate them. If I held on to one thing that was good, even if it was twisted good, I’d hold on to heroin,” she told me. “The last worker bee I had was falling in love with me. He never tried anything but always asked me if I could go out to dinner. I picked up on the fact that these guys were not going to riddle my body with bullets and dump me somewhere. They’d ask, ‘Ever want to go dancing or something?’ They’re real people trying to survive in their car and they’re meeting others, like me, who are trying to survive in their addiction. Even now, as much as I hate heroin, I don’t hate those guys who were my dealers.”

Gary Oxman went to
the state’s Vital Records Department, considered the gold standard by public health researchers looking into death trends. Believing the RAPsters were probably on to something, he was surprised when he did not find records of large numbers of overdoses. He went to the county medical examiner’s office. The office kept lists of each year’s accidental deaths. From those he culled the reports of drug-related deaths, and from them, in turn, came up with a large stack of reports of deaths due to drug overdoses. Yet on his first cursory viewing, he still didn’t see many that were heroin overdoses.

Intrigued, Oxman and a team of researchers pored over these death reports in the basement of the medical examiner’s office for the next three months. And there he saw the problem. Each autopsy physician had different ways of describing a heroin overdose. One used “acute intravenous narcotism.” Another used “narcotics overdose.” There was “polydrug overdose,” though not officially listing heroin. Another used, simply, “heroin overdose.” The numbers had been growing steadily, hidden in the tall weeds of inconsistent language.

Eventually, he tallied more than a hundred heroin overdoses a year since 1996. He dug further into the files, reading all the overdose reports back to the early 1990s. What he and his team found astonished Oxman. There was no sudden spike in heroin deaths, as RAP believed. It was scarier than that. Deaths had been marching straight up for almost a decade and no one had noticed. Multnomah County had 10 heroin overdose deaths in 1991, about the time the Xalisco Boys arrived, and ended 1999 with 111—a 1,000 percent increase in eight years.

“By the time we discovered it,” Oxman said years later, “it wasn’t a new wave at all.”

Unbeknownst to anyone, heroin overdoses had become Multnomah County’s second cause of accidental death among men twenty to fifty-four years old—after car crashes.

“This level of heroin overdose deaths is considered epidemic,” Oxman and his team wrote in a report to the county commission in December 1999. Oxman put together a team of public health workers and sociologists to interview street addicts over the next year. Heroin in Portland had never been cheaper, more available, or more potent. For twenty dollars, a beginning heroin user could stay high all day.

“The story, as we heard it, was of a marketing strategy [for heroin] that had changed from selling to a small number of addicts who had expensive habits and toward a large number of addicts with cheap heroin,” said Oxman.

By the late 1990s, a few lone cops around the western United States, like Dennis Chavez and Ed Ruplinger, were beginning to see that the Xalisco Boys were far more than scruffy independent street dealers.

As time went on, these officers formed a kind of club—one that many of them didn’t know they belonged to—of law enforcement intrigued by what they were seeing and what this could be. Generally, because heroin was not then any jurisdiction’s top drug priority, this club attracted dogged investigators who waded through thickets of Spanish aliases, trusting their own hunches and undaunted by arrests that yielded only a few grams of heroin. On the contrary, once these cops understood the Xalisco Boys’ system and reach, they realized that the small quantities of dope seized were even
more
ominous than large seizures. It meant that a vast network of traffickers had figured out what defined a successful drug bust for U.S. narcotics agents, their bosses, the media, and the public: large amounts of dope, money, and guns. It meant they had rules and practices in place so they’d never be caught with any of that. And they did this relentlessly, over and over, across the country.

In Portland, Oregon, one of these cops was an FBI agent named Paul “Rock” Stone, who, like many of his peers, didn’t quite understand what he was seeing at first. A voluble, hard-charging agent, Stone grew up in California’s Central Valley and was a Merced police officer before joining the bureau. In April 1999 he transferred from a violent crimes unit to the squad investigating narcotics organizations in Portland.

One case he encountered early on was from an informant who said he was buying heroin from Mexicans—two guys with baseball caps in an old car. These street dealers were selling tenth-of-a-gram heroin doses that when tested by the FBI came up 80 percent pure. Street dealers don’t
ever
consistently sell addict-ready doses that pure. The traditional heroin trade made it impossible. In the typical heroin supply chain, the drug moves from wholesalers through middlemen down to street dealers. Every trafficker who handles the dope steps on it—expands the volume by diluting it—before selling it. Usually by the time heroin makes it from the poppy to the addict’s arm, it’s been sold a half-dozen times, stepped on each time, and is about 12 percent pure. FBI and DEA tests always showed that. Stone would have passed the case to local police but for the fact that “you don’t have street-level addicts getting a balloon of 80 percent heroin.” Fatal heroin overdoses he found were surging, so Stone kept at it.

He tracked calls made from the phones taken from these street dealers. With the phones came another revelation. They were calling cities across the country: Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Columbus. And down to a place called Nayarit, Mexico. Something else: The numbers they called in these cities were turning up in cases the FBI had under way across the country.

“A street-level guy selling a tenth of a gram should not hit a half-dozen FBI multiagency cases in other cities and other states. It just does not make sense in our world,” Stone said.

He formed a task force with the DEA and the Portland police. They tapped the dealers’ phones and pagers. Stone marveled at their system’s sophistication. Dispatchers sent pages to drivers that baffled investigators. Something like 181*2*3*0 would show up, for example. Later, informants taught the investigators that the first number was a north–south street, many of which are numbered in Portland; the second number was a code drivers memorized for a major east–west street: 1 was Burnside, 2 was Halsey, and so on; the third number was code for the number of blocks away; the last number was either 0 or 5: north or south, respectively. So 181*2*3*0 told the runner to meet the addict three blocks north of the intersection of 181
st
Street and Halsey.

Sources revealed why dealers didn’t step on the heroin. “It’s because they’re salaried,” Stone said. “The runners are up here, nephews of the regional sales manager, and just coming to do a job, paid five hundred dollars a week. They didn’t care what the potency was; they made the salary no matter how much they sold.”

Salaried employees were unheard-of in the drug business.

“We realized this is corporate,” Stone said. “These are company cars, company apartments, company phones. And it all gets handed to the next guy when they move on.”

In Portland alone by then, nine cells were delivering heroin, each with at least three cars and drivers rotating in and out of each of them. Stone had been to Mexico for work and vacation, but hadn’t heard of Nayarit. Sources told him the runners were all from a small collection of villages that weren’t on most maps: Testerazo, Pantanal, Aquiles Serdán, Emiliano Zapata, and the town Xalisco. The same last names kept popping up, too: Tejeda, Sánchez, Cienfuegos, Diaz, Lerma, Bernal, and others.

As Stone learned more about Nayarit, he realized the opium was produced in the mountains by the families of these same dealers—so they were an amalgam of wholesalers and retailers, each cell a small business, producing its own heroin, and sending it to the United States and selling it by the tenth of a gram on streets of cities like Portland—controlling their own distribution from flower to arm. Between the mountains and the street was not a phalanx of dealers, each making a profit by diluting the dope. “There was no one in between what would normally be step one and step seven but them.”

Stone did some math. Each tenth of a gram sold for about fifteen dollars. The cells were grossing $150,000 from each kilo. Informants told him that it cost about two thousand dollars to produce a kilo of black tar heroin in Nayarit. In Portland, their overhead was cheap apartments, old cars, gas, food, and five hundred dollars a week for each driver. Profit per kilo, Stone figured, was well over a hundred thousand dollars.

With enormous flexibility on price, they could sell heroin cheaply and with unprecedented potency. Because they competed among each other, their prices dropped. Beginning in about 1991, the loose network of Xalisco heroin cells had arrived, cornered, and then saturated Portland. The result was the decadelong rise in overdoses that Gary Oxman had found—a relatively small group of people creating a major drug plague.

By 1999, the Xalisco Boys had been in Portland, Oregon, for almost a decade and brought the price down to where “you could maintain a moderate heroin habit for about the same price as a six-pack of premium beer” per day, Oxman told me years later. “The economy was booming, and there was a huge number of addicts, most of whom were functional. Most of the users went to work high, had a habit [while] working at jobs.”

Overdoses, and not burglaries and robberies, became the new barometers of the city’s heroin problem. Oxman hired an advertising firm to organize focus groups of addicts and design a campaign to reduce the deaths. Oxman’s department had matchbooks printed with messages urging addicts not to shoot up alone, and, when a friend was overdosing, to “dial 911, stay and help. If you can’t stay . . . still dial 911, [then] ditch and dash.”

By 2001, using modern advertising and RAP’s rabble on the streets, the black tar heroin overdose deaths that began when the Xalisco Boys came to town had fallen by more than a third. And for a while, with nothing else priming the market, those overdoses stayed down.

Purdue

OxyContin is a simple pill. It contains only one drug: oxycodone, a painkiller that Germans synthesized in 1916 from thebaine, an opium derivative. Molecularly, oxycodone is similar to heroin.