Dreamland (53 page)

I never spent long reporting this story about pills and heroin without people getting around to happiness and how to achieve it.

“It wasn’t about the laces; it was about the people,” said Davis, who is also a Republican Party leader in Scioto County. “America bought into Charles Dickens’s Scrooge; they couldn’t get past making the money. But it
is
about taking care of the family of Bob Cratchit. It
is
taking care of Tiny Tim that matters, that actually brings joy into your life. We forgot that. We were quite content to have our workers throw a piece of coal on the fire to stay warm. America did that. Charles Dickens gave us the warning, told us, ‘Don’t go down this road.’ Think of the chains on Scrooge’s business partner who died lonely, miserable; then you see him as a ghost with chains all around him. That kind of reminds you of what Portsmouth’s been forever—a ghost town with chains all over it.”

By the time Mitchellace was becoming Sole Choice, Scioto County coroner Terry Johnson had spent most of a decade raising hell about the mounting corpses from pill overdoses in and around Portsmouth—to little avail.

Johnson had watched a generation walk Highway 52 like zombies and get themselves declared simple to go on SSI and get the Medicaid card. He’d seen family members grow addicted and he had rethought every stereotype he had about addicts. Doctors had failed people, he felt.

“We visited incredible harm on the people of America as a profession,” he said. “Pharmacists did also. Every single pill that was killing people in my county was legitimately prescribed, legitimately filled, legitimately paid for.”

Ohio had at the time that intractable pain law that exempted doctors from prosecution for responsibly prescribing opiates. But nothing in state law regulated pain clinics.

“So I decided I have to go to Columbus and write and pass a bill before anybody catches on to what I’m doing,” Johnson told me one afternoon in Portsmouth.

In 2010, Johnson was elected to Ohio’s House of Representatives, the first Republican to hold the Portsmouth seat that had once belonged, seemingly in perpetuity, to Vern Riffe Jr.

Johnson took office in 2011. He and fellow representative Dave Burke, a pharmacist, wrote House Bill 93. This was a rare event. Term limits in Ohio mean that legislators come and go and acquire little knowledge of the issues on which they pass laws by the time they’re termed out. Legislation is often written by lobbyists who are the power that accumulates in Columbus as lawmakers rotate through.

“Instead, we came out of left field,” Johnson said, “and wrote our own legislation.”

For a month he and Burke worked in the shadows like French resistance fighters. They forged a bill that defined and regulated pain clinics. Their House Bill 93 made it illegal, among other things, for a convicted felon to run one. Doctors could no longer dispense pharmaceuticals from their clinics—a widespread pill mill practice up to that point. Jo Anna Krohn and members of SOLACE showed up to support the bill, and Governor Kasich promised to sign it.

In the country’s quintessential battleground state, House Bill 93 passed unanimously in May 2011. Together, Ohio Republicans and Democrats repealed the state’s intractable pain law.

Down in Portsmouth, meanwhile, churches formed an alliance against the pill mills—the central banks of the town’s OxyContin economy. Tom Rayburn, a member of the First Apostolic Church, was tasked to come up with a plan. “The Lord said, ‘Have seven marches,’” Rayburn told me. “Seven is God’s number.”

Marches went by two notorious housing projects, and around the jail, and through downtown. One march circled a pill mill seven times. Marchers stopped at the clinic door. A nurse came out. They were blocking traffic, she yelled. The marchers started singing “Amazing Grace.” A local pastor pulled out a shofar—a ram’s horn like the one Joshua used at Jericho—and blew.

The seventh march was scheduled to go through East Portsmouth. The East End is wedged between the railroad tracks and the Ohio River. Portsmouth’s decline had crushed the area. It was now a ghetto of white families on unemployment and SSI, and pills had settled on the East End like a biblical plague.

But the week had been a good one. House Bill 93 had just passed. The largest drug raid in county history took place as agents swarmed in and shut down a half-dozen pain clinics. Their closure ended the era of pill mills in Portsmouth. None has reopened.

Still, the afternoon of that seventh march felt ominous. The skies stayed dark all day and delivered a cold rain on the hundred marchers as they snaked through the East End. But as the march ended, the torrents ceased. Marchers stood there shivering and drying off. As they did, a rainbow arced over the massive Mitchellace factory. The skies cleared. The sun came and a strange light, cleansing rain fell. As it did, another rainbow appeared, crossing the first in the sky. People stopped and gazed up at the double rainbow embracing Portsmouth from the East End to the west.

“People were coming out of their doors,” said Lisa Roberts. “I looked around at everybody. It got real bright. We had been a town in constant mourning. Every week there was another death. Now the flood was over, this flood of pills. It was like receiving visions of the Virgin Mary or something. It was as if this devil, this evil was lifted.”

Portsmouth did not avoid the new heroin scourge. Quite the contrary. Many in the town’s enormous population of opiate addicts switched to heroin. Crime went up. Detroit dealers of powder heroin began flowing down through Portsmouth. Addicts began going to Columbus for the cheap black tar that the Mexicans were selling like pizza. Before long, you could get either powder or tar heroin in the town where Dreamland once stood.

The Scioto County pill mills illustrated how generalized opiate prescribing had become in America. In their last year of operation, 9.7 million pills were legally prescribed in the county of eighty thousand. But even two years after the pill mills were done, 7 million pills were still prescribed there.

Nevertheless, closing the cynical clinics was a necessary beginning. Like the rescue of Mitchellace, it was an action townspeople took to determine their own future, instead of letting it happen to them.

That became a theme of sorts. Portsmouth also returned to a city-manager form of government. The council hired a man who had actually managed other towns before he came to Portsmouth. No longer would supermarket clerks try to run the town’s affairs. Residents might finally know the trash pickup schedule.

Scott Douthat, the sociology professor at Shawnee State, had a class study the town’s problems and propose solutions that required no extra budget. Douthat and colleagues had earlier surveyed residents. What bothered them most “wasn’t crime, it wasn’t drugs, it wasn’t the economy,” Douthat said. “It was the way the city looked.”

City officials first ignored the survey. “We don’t need no egghead academics coming in here and telling us how to do our jobs,” said one.

But since then, there’d been turnover at city hall. So when Douthat’s students shaped proposals, they were heard. The students urged the city to apply for a federal Community Oriented Policing Grant, which it won. Now there were more officers on the streets. Buy a floodlight for a beleaguered downtown park, the students suggested. Prostitutes magically moved elsewhere. Students proposed a fifty-dollar annual fee on each rental property to pay for code inspectors, and volunteered to input the rental-property data. The town hired code inspectors, whose presence motivated landlords. The students suggested including litter pickup as part of each probationer’s sentence and volunteered to help a judge organize the program because the city didn’t have money for staff. Probationers picked up ninety tons of litter in the first three months.

This was all Municipal Governance 101, but it seemed radically refreshing to a town emerging from a thirty-year narco-economic fog. Residents, meanwhile, realized that the city had almost no budget. Churches, Boy Scouts, and other groups began regular civic cleanups at parks and along the river.

For the first time since the 1960s, someone named Vern Riffe would not be in political office in Portsmouth. Riffe Jr. retired from his powerful post as speaker of Ohio’s House of Representatives in 1995 and died two years later. In 2014, his son, Vern Riffe III, retired after a quarter century as a commissioner of Scioto County. Nine people came out to run for his job.

Meanwhile, gyms began opening in Portsmouth. One of them, Iron Body, moved into an old car dealership downtown and had four hundred members in six months. “People got so tired of seeing addiction and fat people,” said Bill Dever, a local defense attorney who belongs to the club. “So there’s this big turn toward health and fitness. It’s palpable.”

Several buildings downtown were under renovation. A Cincinnati clothing store owner named Terry Ockerman moved back to Scioto County where he grew up. Ockerman bought and renovated an empty four-story furniture store in downtown Portsmouth into gleaming, modern lofts, and had a waiting list to rent them. Next door, he was putting in a café with outdoor tables, a place where people could actually meet and converse.

“Loft living and cafés—what’s hipper than that?” he said. “What we’re selling is a lifestyle.” The town seemed to be welcoming the new, scuttling the old.

In that regard, as I was finishing this book, I received an e-mail from David Procter. He recalled my interview request, which he’d turned down while incarcerated. He was out of prison and had been deported to Canada, he wrote. Thus he was now willing to talk.

I was very interested in speaking with him, and outlined a few topics we might discuss. In response, he wrote that he had a lot to offer on topics that included pill mills and pharmaceutical company promotional campaigns and their effect on his prescribing. But then he added, “Any consultation be it medical or legal always carries a price . . . If you feel that it is worth pursuing then make me an offer when you call me.” He provided an e-mail address and a Toronto-area phone number.

I responded that I do not pay for interviews. “Y
our participation in the Pill Mill industry indeed makes your perspectives and history very interesting,” I wrote. “I would hope that, given your past, you’d want people to know all that happened, you’d want to help illuminate . . . You might again truly help people in pain, which I can assure you is real. You can help atone for some of that by helping shed light on this nationwide problem.”

I haven’t heard back from him. Too bad, he probably had something interesting to say. But what was happening in Portsmouth with an eye to the future as the town battled back engrossed me far more than a disgraced doctor trying to harvest the last few bucks from his criminal past.

Far more vital, for example, was the kind of stuff a young guy named Clint Askew was creating. As I was writing this book and spending time in Portsmouth, Askew had assembled a clan of nine or ten friends obsessed with rap music. Late at night, at his job as a market clerk, he began working out raps and choruses, and beats to go with them. His friends added lyrics of their own. Raw Word Revival was born.

Askew had grown up in Portsmouth and took the town as his raw material, shaping rhymes, like a journalist, from what was around him. He had never used pills, but watched the best of his generation die or walk the streets in tatters looking for a fix. One friend, addicted to pills, used a heated clothes hanger to burn dots on his arm in the shape of a
W
—for “whore.” Each dot was a girl he had slept with. This kid was once so straitlaced that he never cursed.

“I always felt I was supposed to do something with my life,” Askew said.

One night at the market where he worked, a hook occurred to him. What did people really know about this forgotten place? He fastened on its area code, 740, and came up with a chorus:

What the hell you know about the 7-4-0?

If you ain’t lived here, worked here, sold here

If you ain’t caught a case here.

What the hell you know about this place here?

Others in RWR added raps, telling what they knew of growing up here. The song was a cry from out of the Walmart world of rural heartland America, white Appalachian rap about American decline and rebirth.

Used to be known as the 6-1-4

Now it’s just known for the devil at your door

Pain clinics, pill mills

Factories, drug deals . . .

Yes I’m aware an’ I care

An’ I’m ready to revive our greatness

But be patient

’Cause a big black cloud’s hang’n over our town

Flash flood a lotta people going my route wound

Up gettin’ drowned . . . 

They filmed a video on an iPhone at locations around town. Thousands of people watched it on Facebook. The track boomed from cars, people sang it in Walmart. People who hated rap loved the song. Portsmouth suddenly had some rousing, truth-telling art to rally around.

It didn’t take long for folks to see the 740 elsewhere. The 740 was in Floyd County, Kentucky, and in Marion, Ohio. It was in Chimayo, New Mexico, and in the meatpacking towns in southwest Kansas. It was in those long, dreary lines outside the offices of David Procter, down any Walmart aisle, and in that parking lot where Dreamland once stood.