Dreamland (46 page)

These parents made avoidable mistakes and when a son died or entered rehab for the fourth time they again hid the truth, believing themselves alone, which they were as long as they kept silent. This pervasive lie was easily swallowed. It often lay buried beneath lush lawns, shiny SUVs, and the bedrooms of kids who lacked for nothing.

It was easier to swallow, too, because some of these new addicts were high school athletes—the charismatic golden youth of these towns. Athletes opened the door for other students who figured that if cool jocks were using pills, how bad could it be?

One addict I met was Carter, from one of California's wealthiest communities, the son of a banker.

Carter had been a high school star in football and baseball. With no break from sports during the year, he battled injuries that never healed. A doctor prescribed Vicodin for him, with no warning on what Vicodin contained, or suggestions for how it should be used.

Sports were king in Carter's town. It was a place of gleaming mansions, but he felt no sense that education was of value in providing choices in life, much less for the love of learning. These kids' futures were assured. So sports were what mattered. Dads would brag to friends about their sons' athletic exploits, then berate their boys for poor play, urging greater sacrifice. From the athletic director down to parents and teachers they heard, “You need grades so you can play. That was the vibe we got,” Carter told me.

I saw this often. Many new athlete-addicts were not from poor towns where sports might be a ticket out for a lucky few. The places where opiate addiction settled hard were often middle- and upper-middle-class. Parents were surgeons and developers and lawyers and provided their kids with everything. Yet sports were as much a narcotic for these communities as they were to any ghetto. Love of learning seemed absent, while their school weight rooms were palatial things, and in many of them pain pills were quietly commonplace. Just as opiates provided doctors with a solution to chronic-pain patients, Vicodin and Percocet provided coaches with the ultimate tool to get kids playing again.

Carter's coach told him stories of players years before gulping down Vicodin before practices and games. “In my town, the stands were always filled. You wanted to be the hero. So you think, ‘I can't look weak. I gotta push myself.' I would get these small injuries. The coaches wouldn't pay any attention. I taught myself to not pay attention to any injuries.”

Most athletes on every team Carter played on used pills, for injury or recreation. Soon Carter grew addicted to Vicodin and then to OxyContin. From there, as a student athlete at a Division I university, he began using heroin.

I was coming to see football players as symbols of this American epidemic. Their elevated status on campus left some of them unaffected by consequences. Carter was caught selling pills and was told not to do it again. Above all, though; players were in constant pain and expected to play with it. If opiates were now for chronic pain, well, football players endured more chronic pain than most. Necks, thighs, and ankles ached all season.

Medicating injuries to get athletes playing through pain was nothing new. But as oxycodone and hydrocodone became the go-to treatment for chronic pain, organized sports—and football in particular—opened as a virtual gateway to opiate addiction in many schools. Thus, with the epidemic emerged the figure of the heroin-addicted football player. Though, of course, few wanted to talk too much about that.

By 2008, when Jo Anna Krohn's son died, these kinds of delusions had been accepted for almost a decade in places like Salt Lake, Albuquerque, Charlotte, Minneapolis, and other cities that had for that same decade been the drivers and beneficiaries of the greatest boom in the history of U.S. consumer spending. But it was in beat-down Portsmouth, Ohio, where one mother, and not the wealthiest in town by a long shot, had the gumption to own the truth and say something about it.

 

Across Portsmouth, at the Counseling Center, Ed Hughes thought silence was a huge part of the story.

Opiates had exploded all those plans Hughes had in the mid-1990s to consolidate the Counseling Center's operations and focus on improving its internal workings. The center opened years before in a small house. By 1992 it began residential treatment with 16 beds. When I met Hughes, the Counseling Center had 150 beds, a huge waiting list, a staff of close to 200, and had just moved its outpatient center into an abandoned three-story school—due entirely to the swarms of new opiate addicts.

“We've never seen anything move this fast,” Hughes told me.

A decade and a half in, Ed Hughes was still waiting for the arc of addicted clients to plateau and curve downward.

Kids were coming to the center from across Ohio. Many, he said, grew up coddled, bored, and unprepared for life's hazards and difficulties. They'd grown up amid the consumerist boom that began in the mid-1990s. Parenting was changing then, too, Hughes believed. “Spoiled rich kid” syndrome seeped into America's middle classes. Parents shielded their kids from complications and hardships, and praised them for minor accomplishments—all as they had less time for their kids.

“You only develop self-esteem one way, and that's through accomplishment,” Hughes said. “You have a lot of kids who have everything and look good, but they don't have any self-esteem. You see twentysomethings: They have a nice car, money in their pocket, and they got a cell phone . . . a big-screen TV. I ask them, ‘Where the hell did all that stuff come from? You're a student.' ‘My mom and dad gave it to me.' . . . And you put opiate addiction in the middle of that?”

He winced.

“Then the third leg of the stool is the fifteen-year-old brain.”

Hughes saw this all the time, too: adult drug users incapable of making mature choices. This happened because opiates stunted the part of their brain controlling rational action.

“We've got twenty-five- to thirty-year-old, opiate-addicted people who are going on fifteen. Their behavior, the way their brain works, is like an adolescent,” he said. “It's like the drug came in there and overwhelmed that brain chemistry and the front of the brain did not develop.

“The front of the brain has to develop through mistakes. But the first reaction of the addicted person is to head back to the family: ‘Will you rescue me?' Whatever the person's rescued from, there's no learning. There's no experiences, no frontal brain development. They're doing well and then some idea comes into their head and they're off a cliff. It may not be a decision to use. Most relapse comes not from the craving for the drug. It comes from this whole other level of unmanageability, putting myself in compromising situations, or being dishonest, being lazy—being a fifteen-year-old.”

Hughes knew families as addicted to rescuing their children as their kids were addicted to dope. This, too, was an epidemic, Hughes believed.

“I've got forty-year-olds who act like twenty-two-year-olds because their families are so enmeshed in rescuing them. The parents are giving them a place to live, giving them money, taking care of things, worrying about them, and calling me trying to get them into treatment. I try to tell parents it's real important to say no, but say no way back when they're young.”

 

Most of these parents were products, as I am, of the 1970s, when heroin was considered the most vile, back-alley drug. How could they now tell their neighbors that the child to whom they had given everything was a prostitute who expired while shooting up in a car outside a Burger King? Shamed and horrified by the stigma, many could not, and did not.

Opiate use in medicine had been destigmatized by crusading doctors. But destigmatizing the new opiate addiction had no prestigious crusaders. That task fell to parents of dead kids and a few individuals with a flair for guerrilla political action, which is how I would describe Brad Belcher.

I visited Belcher because one night he had kicked the shins of the status quo in his hometown of Marion, Ohio.

Like Portsmouth, Marion once thrived. Power shovels built in Marion helped dig the Panama Canal. But those days and those jobs were gone. Inertia had replaced optimism. Decades into the decline, hundreds of Marion kids had grown addicted to pain pills and then switched to heroin. The chamber of commerce desperately devised slogans: “Downtown Marion: Watch Us Grow.”

A casual observer could sympathize with Marion's city fathers. Like so many Midwestern towns, Marion was afflicted by forces that were awesome and unseen. A prolonged recession, the steady drip of jobs disappearing, had beaten at Marion. A lot of people with aspirations left. So, too, Belcher felt, did any impulse to look at new ways of attacking problems facing the city.

If you counted all the thefts, the drug dealing, the court cases, the hospitalizations, the pawns, the prison, and the people in jail, the town seemed to Belcher to be running on heroin. Yet the cops never appeared to make heroin arrests. The newspaper never mentioned it.

Belcher, twenty-eight, with cropped hair and way of speaking, is a recovering drug addict. With five years sober, he had the kind of energy common to many in recovery and chafed at Marion's apathy.

One night it occurred to him to go online and order eight hundred large black signs with white letters proclaiming the insurgent message:
HEROIN
IS
MARION'S
ECONOMY
. They arrived a week later. Late one foggy night, Belcher stuck those signs all over Marion—in cornfields, near the prison, outside churches, by bus stops, schools, and along streets in the better neighborhoods.

“I was generally hoping for some kind of awareness, to get people talking about some kind of solution,” he said. “It's in everybody's household.”

He was just about to put them up downtown that night when a police officer, a deputy sheriff, and a highway patrolman pulled him over. They roused the city attorney. Marion city government mobilized that night to uproot Belcher's signs. Only ten remained when Marion awoke. But then a drug dealer put snapshots of the signs on Facebook. That created the effect Brad Belcher sought.

The signs became the talk of Marion. Television reporters came. City officials held a town hall meeting. Cops began making heroin arrests and the paper reported them. There was a march to city hall. None of that solved the problem, of course, but it did get people talking, which Belcher took as a start.

Another person I saw cutting through the silence surrounding opiates was Wayne Campbell, a barrel-chested guy with the personality of the football coach he was part-time.

About a year after Jo Anna Krohn in Portsmouth, Ohio, became likely the first parent in the country to raise her voice and organize in response to the opiate epidemic, Wayne Campbell followed suit in the Columbus suburb of Pickerington.

Like Jo Anna's son, Wayne's oldest son, Tyler, had also played football. He was a safety for the Division I University of Akron Zips. In 2009, the school opened a thirty-thousand-seat football stadium, a monument to corporate America in sports. The sixty-one-million-dollar InfoCision Stadium, named for a company that operates call centers, also has a field named for the Summa Health System, a nonprofit hospital; club seating named for FirstMerit Corporation; and a press box named for a local credit union. If ever the Division I school needed a good year from its team, 2009 was it.

Instead, the team disintegrated under the pressure to win and the weight of pills.

The Zip's star quarterback that year, Chris Jacquemain, grew addicted to OxyContin after suffering a separated shoulder. He began stealing and was expelled from the team early in the season, then left school. Jacquemain's life spiraled down. He died of a heroin overdose two years later.

Something like that happened to Wayne's son, Tyler. A walk-on and an eager and aggressive safety, Tyler Campbell was prescribed sixty Percocets after shoulder surgery following the 2008 season. He was given no instructions about the drug and how to use it. Nor was it clear that he needed that many pills to recover from the surgery. Doctors told Wayne it was the usual postsurgical prescription. It seemed to Wayne that doctors wanted to make sure patients didn't return quickly, so they prescribed a lot. That was part of the problem, he figured.

Wayne spoke later with Jeremy Bruce, a wide receiver on the team, who provided a glimpse of the team unraveling that year. The coaches and trainers, Bruce said, felt pressured to field a winning team as the school opened its new stadium. After the games, some of the trainers pulled out a large jar and handed out oxycodone and hydrocodone pills—as many as a dozen to each player. Later in the week, a doctor would write players prescriptions for opiate painkillers, and send student aides to the pharmacy to fill them.

“I was on pain pills that whole season—hydrocodone or oxycodone. I was given narcotics after every single game and it wasn't recorded. It was like they were handing out candy,” Bruce told me.

One problem the team faced was a steep drop-off in talent from the first to the second string, Bruce said. As first-stringers got hurt and second-stringers couldn't fill in, he said, “it's a snowball effect because of the pressure and the stress just to get those [first-stringers] back on the field. I think that's where the narcotics came into play and that's why it was handed out so easily—the stress and the pressure to win right now.”