as close to the socialized medicine model he admired as he could find.
That’s where he met his wife, Sue Ella Kobak, a firecracker lawyer and activist, a coal miner’s daughter raised in a Kentucky coal camp just over the mountain in Poor Bottom Hollow. Introduced by mutual friends, the two had their first real date at an NAACP rally in Bristol, Virginia, called as a response to a planned KKK rally and ending with everyone holding hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” After they married a few years later—the flower girl was a three-legged goat—most locals began referring to the pair as “Doc and that woman,” as Sue Ella tells it, because she refused to change her name.
Van Zee seemed to have all the time in the world for his patients, never mind that he worked sixteen-hour days, rising at four in the morning to type up his patient notes from the previous day’s visits. A doctor who’d trained in Philadelphia recalled working with Van Zee during medical school and residency: “We’d rotate in and out of these big medical centers, and when we’d get back to school, it would occur to us, ‘The best doctor in America is actually out in Lee County, Virginia,’” he told me.
Locals often compared Van Zee, with his salt-and-pepper beard and gangly frame, to Abraham Lincoln. If Lincoln had worn a paper clip for a tie clip to work. If Lincoln had been spotted routinely jogging on the winding mountain roads.
I had read about Van Zee in Barry Meier’s deeply startling (but little-known) 2003 book, Pain Killer, which chronicled the country doctor’s early David-versus-Goliath battle to get OxyContin off the market until it could be reformulated to be abuse-resistant. I had not yet met Van Zee in early 2016 when I ran into one of his patients coming out of a town-hall meeting on opioids sponsored by the Obama White House. She was a nurse, a recent retiree with a thirty-year-old opioid-addicted son whose life, she swears, was saved by Art Van Zee. “When his patients are admitted to the ER, he comes there and sees them no matter what time of day. When my daddy died, he came to our house at two in the morning to pronounce his death.”
Tales of Van Zee’s dedication are as common in Virginia’s coalfields as the rusted-out coal tipples that blanket the bluffs. There was the time he bent his lanky frame into the back of an ambulance to accompany a patient in cardiac arrest for the hour-long ride to the nearest hospital. The time he was so tired from all the house calls and beeper interruptions that some neighbors found him at a train crossing inside his idling car, asleep. The time when he cracked three ribs in the middle of a birding class on his property in the shadow of Wallens Ridge—he’d heard the spectacular clang of a two-car wreck in the distance and ran toward the road, only to find one of his own patients dead and the other driver flipped over, bottles of liquor and pills scattered around his car.
Van Zee sounded the alarm about OxyContin just as its makers were on the threshold of grossing its first billion on the blockbuster drug.
And though he didn’t yet know it, he would spend the remainder of his career dealing with its aftermath—lobbying policy makers, treating the addicted, and attending funerals of the overdosed dead.
*
But back in the early days of OxyContin, Van Zee was as puzzled as he was concerned. He told Sue Cantrell about a new condition he’d spotted among some of his older opioid addicts—skin abscesses caused by injecting the crushed-up drug. He was beginning to think that OxyContin, especially in its 40- and 80-milligram forms, was another animal entirely from the 10-milligram Percocet pills some teenagers used recreationally on the weekends. His region had long been home to prescription drug abuse, though to a much smaller degree; before OxyContin, Van Zee treated only one to three narcotic-dependent patients a year.
But he was starting to get regular phone calls from worried parents about their young-adult kids. Jobs, homes, spouses, and children were being lost to OxyContin addiction. A banker he knew had already spent $80,000 of his savings after his son used his credit cards to buy items he could trade for Oxys.
Down the hall from his office, a physician colleague treated a septuagenarian farmer who had owned land worth $500,000. Within six months, the man had sold everything he had to