Dreamland (38 page)

Their faith was Protestant, but Russian Pentecostals leaned on the severe God of the Old Testament to shepherd them through Soviet oppression. By the time the Soviet experiment ended, seven hundred thousand people, most of them in the Ukraine and Belarus, were fervent Pentecostals. Then, a dream come true. The United States, a land where Protestant faiths were encouraged and even had radio and television stations, opened to them. Tens of thousands emigrated, settling mostly in Sacramento, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon.

Among them was a young couple, Anatoly and Nina Sinyayev, from the city of Baksan. Anatoly was a welder. Nina’s father was an evangelist, touring Germany and Israel to preach the gospel. When the Soviet walls tumbled, the Sinyayevs took their two toddler daughters and fled to Portland.

Nina’s first baby in America was also their first son, Toviy. From then on, she was always pregnant. The couple had ten more children. Anatoly was always working. They moved eight times, mostly in the Portland suburbs of Gresham and Milwaukie where Russian Pentecostals concentrated. They attended a conservative Russian Pentecostal church, and raised their children in their faith.

But their American dreamland contained hazards they hadn’t imagined. Remaining Christian in America, where everything was permitted, was harder than maintaining the faith in the Soviet Union where nothing was allowed. Churches were everywhere. But so were distractions and sin: television, sexualized and permissive pop culture, and wealth.

Leaders turned to the prohibitions that had sustained the faith during the dark decades back home. Girls couldn’t dye their hair, pierce their ears, or wear makeup. Young men and women could not talk, or date. If a man wanted to marry, he went to his pastor, who asked the young woman if the suitor interested her. Russian Pentecostals didn’t associate much with American society, which they viewed as a threat. Families with televisions were deemed less holy, and they hid the machines from visitors. Pastors called TV the devil with one eye.

The Sinyayevs’ daughters were not allowed to wear nail polish or mingle with Americans. But Anatoly kept a television in the basement and turned it on when he thought his children weren’t listening. They watched it when he wasn’t home. The Sinyayevs’ second child, Elina, was their most stubborn. A pretty girl with an aquiline nose, Elina raised her siblings while her mother was pregnant and railed at the church teachings that ruled her home.

“All they preached was that women should wear long skirts, head coverings, no makeup,” she said. “They never teach you about love. They didn’t want us to know God forgives.”

As they moved into adolescence, the Sinyayevs’ oldest children hid their lives from their parents. Elina applied makeup on the school bus each morning, and exchanged her long skirts for pants. After school, she donned Pentecostal clothes, removed her makeup, and arrived home looking as plain as she had when she left.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy frothed. Russian Pentecostals opened auto shops and trucking and welding businesses. After years of Soviet penury, they were suddenly doing quite well, and some grew rich. Pentecostal kids were steeped in consumerist America at school and old-world Russia at home. They endured church but valued wealth. They eschewed college, worked to buy what they wanted, and quietly rebelled against their parents’ old ways.

Then OxyContin appeared. In Portland and other West Coast cities, this seemed to happen in about 2004.

Dr. Gary Oxman watched it arrive from his offices at the Multnomah County Health Department in downtown Portland, and saw overdose deaths again begin to rise. Portland never had many David Procter–style pill mills. Instead, thousands of legitimate doctors began prescribing opiates like OxyContin for chronic pain.

“What we had here is a medical community that’s gone along with the idea that pain is the fifth vital sign,” Oxman said when we met one day years later at a café in northeast Portland. “It’s not this wild abuse. It’s that we have a whole medical community prescribing moderately too much.”

Gary Oxman had seen this story a decade before, of course. Unstinting supplies of Xalisco black tar heroin lashed Portland addiction and death rates ever higher through the 1990s. Oxman, the group of recovering addicts known as RAP, and others toiled to bring down those numbers, and the numbers did drop. But by 2004, OxyContin was undermining that work. “People are getting recruited into opiate addiction through pills,” he said. “Then, because of the cost of the pills, they transfer to heroin.”

Oxman plotted the data on a graph, as he had for his heroin overdose study in December 1999. The same steady rise in opiate overdose deaths began again in 2004.

The legless addict Alan Levine had been clean for almost a decade by then. He had emerged as a rambunctious voice for recovering addicts and was named to a local drug-planning committee and the governor’s council on drug abuse. But in 2006, pills were everywhere. Levine was treated with Vicodin and then OxyContin for pain related to leg sores brought on by his hepatitis C. He began abusing again and soon fell back onto the street, where I found him, in a downtown motel, a few years later. He had switched to black tar, buying from those who bought from those Mexicans who were still delivering all over town. “I tried to get another number for them,” he told me, “but no one wanted to give it up.”

Mostly, though, opiates consumed young people in Portland who had never used them, virtually all of them white. As a group, it appears none fell to it harder than the children of Russian Pentecostals who came fleeing persecution and found U.S. pop culture a greater challenge than anything a Soviet apparatchik could invent.

Among them was Vitaliy Mulyar. Born in the Ukraine, Vitaliy grew up in the cocoon of the Russian Pentecostal church in America—first in Sacramento, then Portland. Like his peers, he spoke fluent Russian, and his English carried the hint of an accent from the country he had left when he was two. He, like his peers, found church desiccated and boring.

Vitaliy and his Pentecostal friends grew up in their own world. He found work as a mechanic. Cars became his passion, especially his prized sequoia-green 1999 VW Jetta.

Then a friend at work offered him a Vicodin. Doctors prescribed them, so how bad could they be? With that, he found a new passion. Soon he migrated to OxyContin and his habit rose to four Oxys a day.

To afford it, Vitaliy became one of Portland’s first Russian Pentecostal dealers of OxyContin. Many Pentecostal kids had money from jobs they worked. Vitaliy sold into his cloistered network of friends. Many more began selling to support their habit; he supplied them. Pill addiction snuck in among kids whose parents took them to church three times a week and ordered them not to watch television. Vitaliy would look out on the congregation each Sunday as he stood to sing Russian hymns and know that half his peers were high on OxyContin. Some nodded off, their faces in their hands.

By 2006, Vitaliy believed he was the largest OxyContin dealer in Russian Pentecostal Portland. He could easily afford the pills he needed each day. He also put thousands of dollars into his VW. In 2008, however, he was arrested and lost his job. On probation, he could no longer sell pills and thus couldn’t afford them either. He switched to cheaper black tar heroin that he bought from the Mexicans who circulated through town. He was in and out of jail, milking his parents for drug money. Russian Pentecostal dealers he owed drove a truck onto his parents’ lawn, demanding their money. He lost his Jetta. Soon he was on the street, sleeping on cardboard in downtown Portland.

Hundreds of Russian Pentecostal kids were following this pattern. Their parents were oblivious, or ashamed, and kept their children’s addiction as hidden as their televisions.

Elina Sinyayev tried heroin the first time with a friend from work, who told her it would relax her. Her sister started with OxyContin. So did Toviy, her brother. Elina lost her job and, desperate for her dope, began dating a Russian Pentecostal heroin dealer, who also got his tar from the Mexicans delivering it like pizza.

Elina believed she was the only one in her family using heroin. But one night at home she looked at her sister and brother and watched them nod off and knew the truth. Two decades after Anatoly and Nina left the Soviet Union for the freedoms of America, each of their three oldest children was quietly addicted to black tar heroin from Xalisco, Nayarit.

Police arrested Elina’s sister for petty theft and Toviy for shoplifting. Anatoly and Nina frantically began checking their children’s arms. Elina, meanwhile, shot up in other parts of her body.

One afternoon in March 2011, Toviy told his mother he had the flu. He went out with Elina and they returned hours later. He seemed different but Nina had too many kids to pay close attention. The next morning, she found her eldest boy in bed, unconscious and gasping for breath. Paramedics couldn’t revive him. He lasted for three days on life support.

The Portland suburb of Milwaukie in Clackamas County is so small and quiet that its police department has only two detectives. That morning, one of the two, Tom Garrett, was on call. He found balloons of heroin and a syringe in Toviy’s bedroom.

Over the next eighteen months, the death of Toviy Sinyayev became a test case for Clackamas County.

Meanwhile, at home, Nina checked the arms of her daughter, Elina, which were always under the long-sleeved blouses of Pentecostal piety. There she found bruises and fierce little scratches.

“We Was Carrying the Epidemic”

Eastern Kentucky

In spring of 2003, a crew of nonunion ironworkers left Greenup County, Kentucky, for Fort Walton Beach, in the Florida Panhandle, to erect the frame of a new Walmart Supercenter.

Greenup County is across the river from Portsmouth, Ohio. It has a long tradition of nonunion ironworker crews, a vestige of the steel industry that once thrived along the Ohio River. Long after steel left, Greenup families were still making their living this way and crews traveled the country for jobs like that Walmart project in Fort Walton Beach.

But by 2003, many of their sons and other young workers were caught up in pill addiction. One addict on that crew was Jarrett Withrow.

Jarrett had already given up a lot for dope. He hoped for a college basketball scholarship. But in high school in Portsmouth, everyone was using pills. Jarrett started in with Vicodin prescribed him by John Lilly, at his clinic downtown. Once addicted, Jarrett stole OxyContin from his father, who was dying of cancer. He remained hooked on OxyContin for eight years. It consumed every plan he had. Before long, he was on a Greenup County iron crew.

That spring of 2003, his crew was on the Fort Walton Beach job for a couple weeks when their pill supply ran short. One afternoon, one of the crew left and came back that night.

“Look what I got,” he said, holding up bottles of pills he was prescribed that afternoon.

Turned out, Florida doctors were awfully easygoing when it came to prescribing these pills. Florida had no prescription-monitoring system that checked on each patient to see whether he had visited other clinics, scamming doctors for pills. No one in Florida had seen the business potential. The Greenup crew began going to these doctors, and asking coworkers from Florida to go as well and sell them the pills. Then they sent the pills back to Kentucky and sold them for triple.

“I can remember at first they felt we was crazy doing these prescription pills,” Jarrett said. “We'd have them go to the doctor for us. At first they'd give the pills to us really, really cheap.”

They hiked the prices eventually. But “that triggered the idea that this was easy,” Jarrett said. “Other people began saying, ‘Let's go find doctors.' My friend continued to go down there monthly, like his family doctor was down there [in Florida] or something. He started telling other people. We was carrying the prescription pill epidemic.”

As I dug around attempting to understand how the opiate epidemic spread, I found many stories like Withrow's. With pain pills now so easily prescribed, the pills moved among vulnerable populations by a casual contact, a chance meeting—not unlike the way Ebola and AIDS viruses advanced. New opiate addicts spread information on where to find pills the way a cough spread germs.

Some of the most potent early vectors were newly christened junkies from eastern Kentucky, where coal mines were closing and SSI and Medicaid cards sustained life. These addicts, feigning pain and injury, mined local doctors and pharmacists, who quickly got wise. Kentucky, to its credit, was one of the first to put in a system tracking what drugs each patient had been prescribed and by whom. But seven states border Kentucky. Many eastern Kentuckians have relatives who left to find work in other states, and, after decades of out-migration, state lines tend not to matter much to folks from the region. The Kentucky prescription monitoring system, therefore, very quickly had the unintended consequence of pushing the state's new opiate addicts out across state lines in search of pills, tapping first their networks of friends and relatives.

This kind of travel in search of illicit products was also already part of many eastern Kentucky counties, where bootlegging was common. These counties had been dry for years. Generations of bootleggers had grown up illegally selling alcohol they brought in from wet counties, which local cops either winked at or shielded. Among these was Floyd County (pop. 30,000), which finally went wet in 1983.

Before that, though, bootlegging “led us into decades of corruption of the police forces,” said Arnold Turner, a former Floyd County prosecutor, and father of the current prosecutor, Brent Turner. “It created a network of criminals and as they lost the ability to deal in alcohol, they had to find another product. Then, with bootlegging, you had a public dulled into low expectations when it came to contraband and illegal activity. People were used to it. No one saw the monster coming. That was the foundation that let this juggernaut [of pills] start coming in.”