Dreamland (47 page)

J. D. Brookhart, the team's head coach that year, said that he knew nothing of the extent of opiate dependence on the team that Bruce describes. “That wasn't the case, that we knew of,” he said. “I don't think it was anything that anybody thought was anything rampant at all. Not from the level I was at.

“It's not like trainers or coaches had any authorization [to prescribe pills]. These pills were ordered by doctors.”

Injuries were the team's overriding issue that season, Brookhart told me from his home in Texas, where he has retired from coaching and now works for a Christian nonprofit. Some twenty-four players missed eight or more games apiece due to injuries that year; this included two of Jacquemain's three backups, he said.

By the end of the 2009 season, the Akron Zips football team was a poster squad for America's opiate epidemic. Not only was Jacquemain dismissed for issues related to his addiction, but as the season wore on and the injuries mounted, Bruce said, “I would say fifteen to seventeen kids had a problem. It seems that most who had an addiction problem had an extensive problem with injuries as well.”

Toward the end of the season, he said, players had learned to hit up teammates who had just had surgery, knowing they would have bottles full of pills. Meanwhile, a dealer from off campus sold to the players, visiting before practice sometimes, fronting players pills and being paid from the monthly rent and food allowance that came with their scholarship.

The 2009 Zips inaugurated the school's new stadium with only three wins that year. The coaching staff was fired at season's end. But the effect of the season lingered on.

Among the team's weaknesses that year was its size on defense. Overall, its defensive line and linebacking corps were small. So, too, were its cornerbacks; they could cover receivers well, but were unable to provide much help in stopping the offense's running attack.

The team's lack of defensive size was felt acutely at one position: safety, Tyler Campbell's position. Running backs often broke through the defensive line and linebackers. It too often fell to safeties to make tackles. Against a monstrous Wisconsin team, the first game of the 2008 season, with a scholarship now and starting his first collegiate game, Tyler for one week was the nation's leader in tackles, with eighteen—an exploit that coaches attributed to his hard work and perseverance.

His stats, though, highlighted the team's weakness. When a safety is making that many tackles, Bruce said, “there is a serious problem. [Opposing running backs] should never get to the secondary that many times.”

As the season went on, Tyler injured his shoulder. His body never fully healed and he had surgery after the season. At the time of the surgery, a snowstorm hit Ohio and his parents couldn't be with him in Akron to ensure he took the pills correctly. Team doctors could give Wayne no records of what Tyler was given after games. But those first sixty post-surgery Percocets following the 2008 season seem to have begun his addiction. By the next season, unbeknownst to those close to him, Tyler had transitioned to OxyContin.

Tyler's 2009 season was spotty. He played eleven games but made only thirty-one tackles, and grew secretive and distant, which teammates and family attributed to his play on the field. In the spring of 2010, his grades dropping and his behavior moody, Tyler was sent home. Over the next year, he was in rehab twice and relapsed. At some point, he switched to heroin.

In June, 2011, his parents put him in an expensive rehab center in Cleveland. Thirty days later, he drove home with his mother, clean, optimistic, and wanting to become a counselor. The next morning she found him dead in his bedroom of an overdose of black tar heroin from Columbus—likely hidden in his room from before he entered rehab, Wayne believes.

With a solid reputation in Pickerington, Tyler's family had kept his addiction a secret. But when he died, Wayne told his wife, “Let's open it up. Come out and be honest.”

The Campbells had three hundred wristbands made for the funeral:
JUST SAY NO FOR TC
. The obituary urged mourners to donate money to a drug prevention group. Fifteen hundred people attended the memorial. As they consoled him, Wayne was struck by how many murmured in his ear, “We've got the same problem at home.”

Two weeks later, Wayne met with fathers who wanted to do something in his son's memory. He knew few of them, but learned that several also had addicted kids. That marked a moment of clarity for Wayne Campbell. “When Tyler died, it lifted the lid,” he said. “We thought it was our dirty little secret. I thought he was the only one. Then I realized this is bigger than Tyler.”

From that grew a nonprofit called Tyler's Light. By the time I met Wayne Campbell, Tyler's Light had become his life's work just as Jo Anna Krohn was now devoted to SOLACE. He spoke regularly to schools about opiates, showing a video of white middle-class addicts, one of whom was a judge's daughter.

Wayne invited others to join him. Among them was Gary Cameron, commander of the Columbus Police Department's narcotics unit. Cameron's team was fighting the Xalisco heroin networks crawling over Columbus; meanwhile, as he told auditoriums full of school kids, his stepson was addicted to their heroin.

Cameron viewed the Xalisco Boys as a new vanguard in narcotics—resembling isolated terrorist cells more than a traditional trafficking organization. Most drivers, he noticed, really didn't know much about the drug they sold. They lived isolated in small apartments. No arrest slowed down these cells. Too many American kids were now hooked on opiates. Neither they nor their parents had much idea of what they were up against. So, in the time of the Xalisco Boys, Gary Cameron viewed education as, fundamentally, police work.

“We were quick to talk about the problems we associated with crack,” Cameron said, one day after a Tyler's Light presentation. “We just don't talk about heroin addiction.”

About a year after Wayne Campbell formed Tyler's Light, Paul Schoonover called. Could he and his wife, Ellen, help in any way? Schoonover asked. It had been a few months since the Schoonover's  son, Matt, had died from a black tar heroin overdose, the day after leaving three weeks of drug treatment.

As I researched this story, the Schoonovers were among the first parents I met on my first trip to Columbus. The death of their son had come well into this epidemic, yet it had blindsided them. Until Matt's death, they knew nothing of it.

So at the funeral Paul stood and told hundreds of mourners the truth of how Matt had died. About the pill use, the OxyContin then the heroin. He told them how through all this, Matt led a normal suburban life; he played tennis and golf. Most of his friends were goal driven and making plans. Matt had goals, but had trouble following through to accomplish them. Still, he was working and part of the family. He never dressed shabbily, and though he ran out of cash quickly, he never stole from his parents. His bedroom door was always open. He never looked like what his parents imagined an addict to be. Yet all the while, it appeared, he led a dual life.

“Was I seeing what I only wanted to see?” said Ellen later. “I might have been.”

Shortly after Matt's death, Paul and Ellen Schoonover attended the speech of a motivational speaker with a breakfast group of well-heeled middle-aged couples like themselves. The speaker that day asked them to imagine a second half of their lives about more than just enjoying what they'd accumulated.

“The question was ‘How do you take that second half of your life and make something significant from it?'” Paul said when I met the couple in the office of their Columbus insurance agency. “Maybe not a lot of people come to that question. I don't know that I would have. We knew what we were going to do.”

Matt's death had led them there. The Schoonovers took it as a calling. They once thought addiction a moral failing, and now understood it as a physical affliction, a disease. They had thought rehabilitation would fix their son. Now they saw relapse was all but inevitable, and that something like two years of treatment and abstinence, followed by a lifetime of 12-step meetings, were needed for recovery.

After kicking opiates, “it takes two years for your dopamine receptors to start working naturally,” Paul said. “Nobody told us that. We thought he was fixed because he was coming out of rehab. Kids aren't fixed. It takes years of clean living to the point where they may—they
may
—have a chance. This is a lifelong battle. Had we known, we would never have let Matt alone those first few vulnerable days after rehab. We let him go alone that afternoon to Narcotics Anonymous (NA) his first day out of rehab. He had his new clothes on. He looked good. He was then going to play golf with his friend. Instead of making a right turn to go to the meeting, he made a left turn and he's buying drugs and dying.

“When you start into drugs, your emotional development gets stunted. Matt was twenty-one, but he was at the maturity level of middle-teen years. Drugs take away that ability to act emotionally mature. The drug becomes your god.”

The speaker's question that day prompted the Schoonovers to channel their grief. Too many parents were as lost as they'd been. So Paul called Wayne Campbell, hoping to use Matt's story to sound the alarm and prepare parents for what awaited them.

“There was so much evil in all of this,” said Ellen Schoonover. “We will turn that into something good. We can embrace it and find meaning from Matt's death.”

 

PART IV

America

Five years after I stood on that Ohio River bank in Huntington, West Virginia, wondering what I was onto, the victims of America’s opiate scourge had emerged from the shadow and the silence. They were everywhere now, and known to be so. Heroin had traveled a long way from the back alleys of New York City and William Burroughs’s
Junky
. It was even, I discovered as my story wound down, in the upscale pseudo-Spanish subdivisions of terra-cotta tile and palm trees in Southern California not far from where I lived. Especially there.

A half hour from my house, the town of Simi Valley agonized over a spate of opiate overdose deaths—eleven in a year. Simi Valley, conservative and religious, has long been an enclave for cops. Many LAPD officers live in the town. Simi’s vice mayor is a Los Angeles police officer. So for years Simi was one of America’s safest towns. According to the crime statistics, it still is. But with pills everywhere and heroin sold in high schools, its kids were now also dying of dope. Simi youths clogged the methadone clinic. Nearby Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, and Santa Clarita told similar stories.

Low crime and high fatal overdose rates—this was the new American paradigm. A happy surface over an ominous reality.

“We came to this safe city and we’re doing everything society’s asked us to do and yet here we are burying our kids,” said Susan Klimusko, whose son, Austin, died from a heroin overdose.

Klimusko and others in Simi formed a coalition to fight back, Not One More, supported by the city council and the town’s retail core: Starbucks, California Pizza Kitchen, Home Depot, Subway, and others.

Yet these were times when heroin was still invisible, conveniently hidden away, at least to anyone who wasn’t a junkie, or a parent of one. Then on Super Bowl Sunday 2014, America awoke to the news that one of its finest actors was dead.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, forty-six, was found that morning in his Greenwich Village apartment, a syringe in his arm and powder heroin in packets branded with the Ace of Spades near his corpse. Blood tests showed he had heroin in his system, combined with cocaine, amphetamine, and benzodiazepine. The Oscar-winning actor—a father of three—had checked into rehab the previous May for ten days, and then, pronouncing himself sober again, left to resume a hectic film schedule. Just as the death of Rock Hudson thirty years ago forced the country to recognize AIDS, Hoffman’s death awoke it to the opiate epidemic.

Within days, media outlets from coast to coast discovered that thousands of people were dying. Heroin abuse, the news reports insisted, was surging. Almost all the new heroin addicts were hooked first on prescription painkillers. This was not new; it had been happening for fifteen years. And there was more to it than drugs. This scourge was, I believed, connected to the conflation of big forces: of economics and marketing, of poverty and prosperity. But this was tough to articulate in four-minute interviews and a lot of it got lost in the media’s rush to discover the new plague. Attorney General Eric Holder described an “urgent and growing public health crisis” and called on police and paramedics to carry naloxone, an effective antidote to opiate overdose.

By then, though, a lot about this story had already been changing.

Two decades into the pain revolution, a consensus had emerged that opiates were unhelpful, even risky, for some varieties of chronic pain—back pain, headaches, and fibromyalgia among them. Several clinics and doctors I spoke with had policies against using them for those ailments. One 2007 survey of studies of back pain and opiates found that “use disorders” were common among patients, and “aberrant” use behavior occurred in up to 24 percent of the cases. It was unclear, the authors found, whether opiates had an effect on back pain in the long term.

By the end of the 2000s, it was already common for people to go from abusing OxyContin to a heroin habit. Purdue Pharma recognized this and in 2010 reformulated OxyContin with an abuse deterrent, making the drug harder to deconstruct and inject. The intent was to make Oxy less abusable. It did. Had the company done this in 1996, our story might have been different. But now there was a swollen population of OxyContin addicts nationwide. Without Oxy, they flocked to heroin in even greater numbers.