in 1998. “I thought, that’s all I need from here on out. I will live life like this,” Rosemary Hopkins, in recovery and on MAT under the care of Van Zee since 2009, told me in a counseling room at Sister Beth Davies’s office.
Rosemary had a theory about the way corporations had been allowed to unleash a flood of painkillers, a notion I heard more than once as I traversed Appalachia’s former factory and mining towns: “For that strong of a drug, for it to be everywhere you looked, it was like the government was controlling it, trying to get rid of the lowlifes.”
She laughed when she said it, but I could see what she was getting at. Although her hypothesis was somewhat different, it was a version of what federal prosecutor Andrew Bassford meant when, quoting President Garfield, he proposed that governments fail their citizens “not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification.”
“I used to do eighty cases in a good year, but in recent years it’s been twenty-six, forty, whatever,” Bassford said in April 2017. “So the amount of cases being done does not match the problem, and we have found ways to make it more difficult to do cases—more boxes that have to be checked, more things to do in the service of perfection.”
When I offered that I was leaving his office after our third interview depressed—again—he said, “Well, you should be. Rehab is a lie. It’s a multibillion-dollar lie.”
An annual $35 billion lie—according to a New York Times exposé of a recovery industry it found to be unevenly regulated, rapacious, and largely abstinence-focused when multiple studies show outpatient MAT is the best way to prevent overdose deaths. “I’m afraid we don’t have good data on outcomes from residential programs,” said John Kelly, the Harvard researcher. While research supports users remaining in their home environments on outpatient MAT, desperate families continue to grasp for “cures” offered by companies marketing abstinence-only rehabs. “Part of it is, when you spend that much money, you think it’s going to work,” Cheri Hartman said. “But it is killing people for that myth to be out there—that the only true cure is abstinence.”
*
I hoped the stories of Ronnie Jones and his victims would illuminate the ruts in both a criminal justice system that pursues a punishment-fits-all plan when the truth is much more complicated and a strained medical system that overtreats people with painkillers until the moment addiction sets in—and health care scarcity becomes the rule.
I hoped, too, that my interview with Jones would help answer Kristi Fernandez’s questions about what led to her son Jesse’s premature death. Was Ronnie Jones really the monster that law enforcement officials made him out to be? Had the statewide corrections behemoth that returns two thousand ex-offenders a year to Virginia’s cities, counties, and towns played a role in his revolving door of failures?
I had come to interview Ronnie Jones expecting I would have two hours, no recording devices allowed. On the day of our meeting, though, the visit stretched from morning into late afternoon, with the prison handler monitoring our visit from the other side of a glass wall and inexplicably allowing us to talk for more than six hours.
I had the better part of a day to try to discern how a sleepy agricultural county nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with covered bridges and lovingly preserved two-hundred-year-old log homes, had gone from having a handful of heroin users to hundreds in a few short months, and how much Ronnie Jones was to blame for it.
*
Understandably guarded at first, Ronnie, thirty-nine, was gentlemanly and polite throughout the visit. During the two years he’d spent there, he said, he spent his time working out, studying Arabic and Swahili, and reading the works of Guy Johnson, Eric Jerome Dickey, and Maya Angelou. On my way to the prison, I’d been listening to the audiobook of Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow, I told him, the seminal book on mass incarceration that likens the War on Drugs to a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow.
“I’ve read The New Jim Crow twice,” Ronnie said. He’d also read lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s majestic Just Mercy, a memoir about his work against the racial bias and economic inequities inherent in the criminal justice system, which included efforts on behalf of falsely accused death row inmates. “It had me crying when I read it,” he said. These books we had both read challenged