Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,147

know”: Author interview, Charles Cullen, May 11, 2017.

uninsured Joey applied to the hospital-run clinic: Danny Gilbert said he used the website goodrx with each prescription to figure out which pharmacy in town had the best prices that week; author interview, Oct. 27, 2017. After Joey’s death, Carilion Clinic wrote off more than $10,000 of her bills as charity care.

those who have serious psychiatric problems: Author interview, Hartman, Aug. 8, 2017.

Jamie worried, too: Author interviews with Jamie Waldrop, Hartman, Hurley, Cullen, and Danny and Wendy Gilbert, April and May 2017.

“asinine to tell a drug addict you’ve got to be clean”: Author interview: Danny Gilbert, April 11, 2017. Account of Joey’s death and cause of death: Author interview, Danny, Wendy, Britney, and Skyler Gilbert, Sept. 22, 2017.

“She fought hard against the demon of addiction”: Obituary for Jordan Racquel (Joey) Gilbert, Roanoke Times, March 29, 2017.

“If she fails, she is on her own”: Author interview, Mehrmann, May 15, 2017.

Sweet T: Mother’s Day text exchange between Tess and Mehrmann, May 14, 2017.

CHAPTER TWELVE. “BROTHER, WRONG OR RIGHT”

Interviews: Rosemary Hopkins, Andrew Bassford, Cheri Hartman, Ronnie Jones, Anthony West, Dr. Andrew Kolodny, Lauren Cummings, Pastor Brad Hill, Mark Schroeder, Christine Madeleine Lee, Bryan Stevenson, Thomas Jones III, Robert Pack, Don Wolthuis, Sherwin Jacobs, Kristi Fernandez, Beth Schmidt, Richard Ausness, Chip Jones

“lull all pain and anger and bring forgetfulness”: The Odyssey of Homer, translated by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 47.

soul was “being rubbed down with silk”: From Druin Burch’s Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It (London: Random House UK, 2010), 16. A worthwhile examination of the morphine molecule’s pull in literature, art, and film offers several other examples: Lecture by Susan L. Mizruchi, “Opioids: The Literary, Experiential Point of View,” Boston Athenaeum, June 13, 2017, available at vimeo/221754272.

“trying to get rid of the lowlifes”: Author interview, Rosemary Hopkins, Sept. 23, 2016.

“more boxes that have to be checked”: Author interview, Andrew Bassford, April 10, 2017.

An annual $35 billion lie: Michael Corkery, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and David Segal, “Addiction, Inc.: Marketing Wizards and Urine-Testing Millionaires: Inside the Lucrative Business of America’s Opioid Crisis,” New York Times, Dec. 27, 2017.

“we don’t have good data”: Author interview, Dr. John Kelly, Jan. 2, 2018.

“killing people for that myth to be out there”: Author interview, Cheri Hartman, Jan. 16, 2018.

statewide corrections behemoth that returns: Author interview, Anthony West, chief operations officer, Virginia CARES, July 14, 2017.

likens the war on drugs to a system: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). Alexander’s thesis was further delineated by a 2017 book by scholar John F. Pfaff, in which he argues that the incarceration spike was fueled more by elected local prosecutors, the vast majority of them white men who operate behind a veil of secrecy and aggressively forge plea deals in 95 percent of cases: Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Mass Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

shift in public spending from health and welfare programs: “Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections, U.S. State and Federal Prison Population, 1925–2015,” Sentencing Project: sentencingproject/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf; Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Grau), 2014, introduction.

one in three black men was destined to end up: Marc Mauer, Sentencing Project, “Addressing Racial Disparities in Incarceration,” Prison Journal, 2011. The Washington Post elucidated those statistics (and found them to be somewhat outdated by 2015) in Glenn Kessler, “The Stale Statistic That One in Three Black Males Will End Up in Jail,” June 16, 2015. In the Washington, D.C., area where Jones hailed from, the statistic was three out of four, according to Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6–7, citing 2000 corrections data.

recidivism rate of 75 percent: Matthew R. Durose, Alexia D. Cooper, and Howard N. Snyder, “Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 30 States in 2005: Patterns from 2005 to 2010,” U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, April 2014. Among prisoners released in 2005 and tracked for five years: 32 percent had drug-related offenses, and of those, 77 percent reoffended within that five-year period, compared with 57 percent of all offenders released who reoffended, and 75 percent of drug traffickers reoffended: bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rprts05p0510.pdf.

statistically less likely to use or to deal: Blacks are far more likely to be arrested for selling or possessing drugs than whites, even though whites use drugs at the same rate, and whites are also more likely to sell drugs: Analysis