Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,21
the hired miners booed, but Sister Beth didn’t waver. Though the coal company eventually paid to clean up the mess—not nearly enough, in the nun’s opinion—the flood of slurry-pond waste was an ominous harbinger for St. Charles.
If the Purdue executives thought that people like Sue Ella and Sister Beth could be bought, they had not done their homework. Both had stood on the picket lines with strikers and their families for nine life-and-death months in 1989, when the Pittston Coal Company wanted such huge union-contract concessions as reduced pay-in to retired miners’ health insurance and wage cuts. Sister Beth had literally lain on the ground, to block the coal trucks, while Sue Ella stood next to the striking miners with her six-month-old baby in a carrier.
Over the years, Sue Ella’s and Sister Beth’s lives had been threatened because of their social activism, including once when Beth convinced an illiterate coal miner not to sign away all company liability for a mining accident. (“Greed makes people violent,” she told an interviewer in 1982. “When we stand with the least in the struggle for justice, there’s a price to pay.”)
The Purdue offer was just another page in an old story. This is what happens when wealthy people think they own you, Sister Beth told her Lee County friends. Since the first piece of coal was chiseled from the first mountainside rock by a large out-of-state corporation, the region had suffered from a pattern of exploitation, she said, ticking off all the mining-company executives who’d flown in over the years and spread their money around trying to buy peace, and then shut down unions, reduced black-lung benefits, and kept other industries out to maintain low labor costs.
Sister Beth thought about all the firsts she was starting to see at her Addiction Education Center in Pennington Gap, where she and Van Zee were now conferring daily over their mutual patients, among them young women now prostituting themselves for drug money. She thought about the high school senior, a cheerleader, snorting OxyContin in the school library. About the people having their teeth pulled for the sole purpose of eliciting an Oxy prescription from a dentist. About the middle-aged woman who’d ruefully remarked in the middle of being fingerprinted and photographed that she was wearing the same gray sweatpants she’d had on the last time she was arrested for distributing OxyContin. “I’d burn those if I were you,” a sheriff’s deputy quipped.
But it wasn’t funny to Sister Beth.
She recalled the first phone call she’d taken about the drug, in the late 1990s. The informant had told the cop. The cop called the pharmacist. The pharmacist called Sister Beth. It was another game of telephone, only this message remained tragically on point:
“Beth, you wait,” pharmacist Stewart had told her on the phone. “They’re saying it’s nonaddictive, but you mark my words: This is the beginning of a disaster for us.”
The disaster was now in full bloom. And Sue Ella and Sister Beth guessed exactly where it was headed. Even if Big Pharma and the pill-mill doctors could be brought to justice, the morphine molecule was so deadly, its lure so intractable, that those who were already addicted were likely to be ruled by it for the rest of their lives.
Sister Beth threatened to quit the coalition if anyone accepted Purdue Pharma’s $100,000 grant, and Van Zee’s letter of acceptance was never sent. The grant was nothing more than “blood money,” she said, and the coalition agreed.
Poff Federal Building, Roanoke, Virginia
Chapter Three
Message Board Memorial
While regional reporters from Boston and Roanoke were unpacking the damage done in their rural outposts, the story of the burgeoning OxyContin epidemic didn’t hit the national media until February 9, 2001, when New York Times reporter Barry Meier and a colleague swooped in just north of Lee County for a front-page story on Operation OxyFest, a nine-month federal investigation that had produced the biggest drug-abuse raid in Kentucky history. “We caught 207” user-dealers, a federal prosecutor told Meier. Most of those arrested were patients who had coaxed pills out of doctors who were either busy, slipshod, or quietly cooperative in overprescribing the drug. “We didn’t catch half of them; that’s how pervasive this thing is.”
That summer, it became clear that OxyContin abuse had seeped out of the western Virginia and Maine backwoods, creeping up and down the Appalachian range. The news was disseminating, finally, not just to big cities on the East Coast but also into the Deep South and parts of the Southwest.