Dreamland (43 page)

Then Prior watched in amazement as heroin came to town. Heroin was as foreign to these rural, white communities of southern Ohio as extraterrestrials. Wasn’t it an urban drug? For blacks in Baltimore or D.C.? Puerto Ricans in New York? It had never had anything to do with Appalachia.

This heroin, too, was like nothing Prior had ever seen, even in movies. It was sticky and dark brown, like rat crap, yet potent and, above all, cheap. It was called black tar. In Columbus, Mexicans were delivering it by car, like pizza, at prices that were a fourth what Oxy cost, and offering volume discounts. In Chillicothe and towns around Fairfield County, every addict became their salesman, looking for new clients he could parlay into enough orders to make a trip to Columbus worthwhile. From Fairfield County, the news marched south, down through a region where OxyContin had already tenderized a generation of folks to opiate use.

Athens County, ninety miles southeast of Columbus, had seen almost no heroin ever. By 2008, 15 percent of the admissions to a treatment center there were related to heroin, and almost all were injecting it. In 2012, the center was treating more heroin addicts, mostly for black tar, than alcoholics.

And so it went. OxyContin first, introduced by reps from Purdue Pharma over steak and dessert and in air-conditioned doctors’ offices. Within a few years, black tar heroin followed in tiny, uninflated balloons held in the mouths of sugarcane farm boys from Xalisco driving old Nissan Sentras to meet-ups in McDonald’s parking lots. Others, too, got in on the trade. Black guys from Detroit and Dayton discovered southern Ohio and brought powder heroin.

Phillip Prior was now knee-deep in what was unthinkable a few years before: rural, white heroin junkies.

“I’ve yet to find one who didn’t start with OxyContin,” he said. “They wouldn’t be selling this quantity of heroin on the street right now if they hadn’t made these decisions in the boardroom.”

PART III

“Now It's Your Neighbor's Kid”

Nashville, Tennessee

Out on the northwest side of Nashville, Tennessee, Judge Seth Norman has come to expect phone calls to start pouring in around late January every year.

“The legislature comes back in session in January,” Norman said.

The calls come from state legislators, each with the same problem: an addicted son, a daughter, a brother-in-law.

“‘Um, uh, my nephew down in Camden, you think maybe you might be able to help?' I get those kinds of calls,” he told me while we sat in the office adjacent to his courtroom.

Most of the country's twenty-eight hundred drug courts are set up to divert drug abusers away from jail and prison and into treatment somewhere. Seth Norman runs the only drug court in America that is physically attached to a long-term residential treatment center. He takes addicts accused of drug-related nonviolent felonies—theft, burglary, possession of stolen property, drug possession—and puts them in treatment for as long as two years as an alternative to prison. Down the hall from his court are dorms with beds for a hundred people—sixty men and forty women.

I visited Judge Norman's Nashville facility one overcast fall afternoon because this epidemic was not the same as those of the past. For the first time since the years after heroin was invented, the root of the scourge was not some street gang or drug mafia but doctors and drug companies. I went to visit Judge Norman because I wanted to see what changes widespread addiction to a drug, usually associated with the ghetto or barrio might have wrought in America now that virtually all the new addicts were rural and suburban white people.

Seth Norman is eighty and possesses snow-white hair, a genteel Southern manner, and a drawl to go with it. He started the drug court/treatment program in 1996 and built it almost single-handedly by scrounging beds and ovens and lawn mowers from Tennessee state surplus.

Part of his efforts included frequent visits to the state legislature, where his pleadings for more funding fell on deaf ears for a good long time. Norman would go on to the lawmakers about his figures. The drug court and long-term treatment could keep most addicts out of prison—saving the state thirty-two thousand dollars a year over what it costs a prison to house an inmate. The drug court, he would say, boasted a recidivism rate of only 20 percent among those who finished the treatment program; compare that with over 60 percent for those leaving prison, he told them. This was before the pill-and-heroin epidemic swept through. Most legislators took drug treatment for softheaded do-gooderism and held to the lock-'em-up attitude that voters preferred in a red state like Tennessee.

If Norman's experience is any guide, however, that hard-line attitude has softened recently. “It's taken sixteen years to convince the legislature that it is cheaper to put them [in drug treatment] than to put them in prison,” he said.

The cost savings weren't what did the trick, though. Treatment has always been more effective and cheaper than prison for true drug addicts. What's changed, Norman said, is that no longer are most of the accused African American inner-city crack users and dealers. Most of the new Tennessee junkies come from the white middle and upper-middle classes, and from the state's white rural heartland—people who vote for, donate to, live near, do business with, or are related to the majority of Tennessee legislators.

As the opiate epidemic mangled the middle class, these kids doped up and dropped out. Earlier generations of opiate addicts became self-employed construction workers or painters, because that was all they could manage with heroin, and often jail, in their lives. With the new generation, time would tell how they would do, but it wasn't looking good. A large subset of these new young addicts had criminal records now. Many were on probation; a good number went to prison. Either way, their parents were realizing that life with a record was as stunted as life with an opiate addiction. Any dreams these kids' parents once had for them were now improbable. Even qualifying to rent an apartment was hard. With a criminal record, finding a job in the teeth of the great recession was almost impossible.

Some parents were so worn-out that they welcomed a child's departure for prison. But the opiate epidemic also made a lot of criminal-justice reformers out of rock-ribbed white conservatives.

This is what Judge Seth Norman discovered. The experience had, shall we say, modified state legislators' hard-line attitudes toward the proper role of rehabilitation in dealing with addicts accused of drug and property crimes.

“One thing that makes [legislators] more amenable to treatment is that it's hard to find a family now that hasn't been hit by addiction. Started out, fifteen years ago, very few members of the legislature had them. ‘Naw, ain't nobody in my family going to touch anything like that.' Not so anymore. Now they have seen it firsthand.”

Norman's no dummy. He named several dorms at his treatment facility for friendly legislators—Haynes Hall, Henry Hall, Waters Hall. When I visited he claimed the support of the sitting governor and state directors of corrections, public safety, and substance abuse.

Norman couldn't have imagined this when he was scrounging surplus sofas and coaxing pennies from elected officials in the late 1990s. But as the opiate epidemic ravaged white communities across Tennessee, it had a way of changing the minds of even the hardest hard-liners.

Signs of this were (quietly) appearing nationwide. The opiate epidemic was forcing judges to imagine new kinds of courts—veterans' courts, mental health courts—designed to treat the causes of what landed a suspect in a criminal case.

In Ohio, the opiate epidemic had swollen the prison population beyond capacity. Prison director Gary Mohr, appointed by Governor John Kasich, a Republican, told a newspaper that he favored expanding prison drug treatment—and had done so in four prisons. He also suggested that he would resign if the legislature decided to build more prisons in response to the epidemic.

Republicans across the country, in fact, seemed to be changing their views. In Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, and other states, GOP lawmakers were pushing for what the
Wall Street Journal
termed “a more forgiving and nuanced set of laws.”

“You're seeing this huge groundswell for criminal justice reform really being driven by conservative circles,” said Chris Deutsch, with the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. “Conservative governors are starting to invest in drug courts. In the last five years, we're really starting to see statewide drug courts in every county.”

Texas opened drug courts and was able, therefore, to close prisons.

Kentucky congressman Hal Rogers, a staunchly conservative Republican, has become a strong proponent for drug courts since his district, which included Floyd County, has been hammered by prescription pill abuse. “The epidemic of illegal drugs is by far the most devastating thing I have seen in my more than forty years of public service,” Rogers says on the front page of his website, where he also touts the thirty drug courts in his twenty-four-county district.

Kentucky state legislator Katie Stine, a Republican, introduced a bill as I was writing this book that made it easier to charge a heroin dealer with the death of someone who died from an overdose. But key to Stine's bill was increased funding for addiction treatment and education.

“You used to think, ‘Oh, the heroin addicted, that would be someone in some back alley, someone I don't know,'” Stine told a local TV station. “Now . . . it is your kid. It's your next-door neighbor's kid.”

Georgia governor Nathan Deal heard recovering addicts tell their stories at graduation ceremonies from the drug court where his son is the presiding judge. “They all have their own stories, but a common thread runs through all of them,” Governor Deal told the
Journal
, explaining why he had tripled the number of drug courts in three years. “They were given a second chance, and they had been rehabilitated.”

Several factors made this politically feasible in states like Georgia. Declining crime rates were certainly one. Stressed budgets during the great recession were another—though treatment has always been proven cheaper than incarceration.

Yes the fact was that, coincidentally or not, this change of heart was happening among conservatives just as opiate addiction was spreading among both rural and middle-class white kids across the country, though perhaps most notably in the deepest red counties and states. Drug enslavement and death, so close at hand, were touching the lives, and softening the hearts, of many Republican lawmakers and constituents. I'll count this as a national moment of Christian forgiveness. But I also know that it was a forgiveness that many of these lawmakers didn't warm to when urban crack users were the defendants. Let's just say that firsthand exposure to opiate addiction can change a person's mind about a lot of things. Many of their constituents were no longer so enamored with that “tough on crime” talk now that it was their kids who were involved. So a new euphemism emerged—“smart on crime”—to allow these politicians to support the kind of rehabilitation programs that many of them had used to attack others not so long ago.

Meanwhile, buoyed by his new purchase with Tennessee's political class, Judge Seth Norman had done some thinking. Four or five drug courts like his could be funded with a one-penny tax on every prescription opiate pill sold in Tennessee. After all, some four hundred million of the pills were prescribed annually to a state of six million people.

By the time I was leaving Nashville and heading again to Portland—where I had heard a Xalisco Boy was just sentenced for the death of Toviy Sinyayev, the Russian Pentecostal kid—no drug company had stepped up to endorse Norman's idea.

Like Cigarette Executives

Portland, Oregon

Because every call means money, Xalisco Boys never ignore their phones during business hours.

Thus Milwaukie police detective Tom Garrett was surprised that after calling the phone of a Xalisco Boy known as Doriro for a half hour, no one answered.

Garrett and his colleagues were now full bore into investigating the heroin-overdose death of Toviy Sinyayev—the son of Russian Pentecostal couple Anatoly and Nina Sinyayev. A dozen harried days had passed since Toviy’s mother found him comatose in his bedroom. Under pressure, his sister Elina told police that their dealer was a Russian Pentecostal heroin addict named Aleksey Dzyuba.

They put a wire on Elina. She called Dzyuba. Going through withdrawals and with her brother on life support, Elina met the dealer in a Safeway parking lot, surveilled by a dozen undercover officers. She bought heroin from him, and passed him some marked cash. As he drove from the parking lot, officers descended and arrested him.

With that, a strategy that Portland had adopted to combat the Xalisco Boys was set in motion, named for a college basketball player who died in 1986 after using cocaine a friend had given him.

A so-called Len Bias case is based in federal law. Under that law, a person who supplies drugs that cause a fatal overdose may be charged with a conspiracy that results in death—a charge that carries a twenty-year prison sentence. Cops have to prove the person died from the suspect’s drugs; a chain of custody has to be established. But if they can do that, they have a powerful prosecutorial tool and one that was getting a closer look in many parts of the country as the opiate epidemic and fatal drug overdoses spread across the nation. One place that refined the strategy was Portland, Oregon.