Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,35
He had even written a poem about one, titled “OxyContin,” published in Annals of Internal Medicine:
It might have been easier
If OxyContin swallowed the mountains,
and took
The promises of tens of thousands
of young lives
Slowly, like ever-encroaching kudzu.
Instead,
It engulfed us,
Gently as napalm
Would a school-yard.
Mama said
As hard as it was to bury Papa
after the top fell
in the mine up Caney Creek,
it was harder yet
to find Sis that morning
cold and blue,
with a needle stuck up her arm.
Top of her class,
with nothing but promise ahead
until hi-jacked by
the torment of needle and spoon.
*
Ed Bisch and Lee Nuss had driven up together from her home in Florida, recycling the same signs they’d carried to the Orlando protest, only a little rumpled from the Caribe Royale sprinkler assault.
It fell to Bisch to lead the parade of fifty grieving relatives from a small park to the courthouse. His sign read oxy kill$ in big block letters.
Nuss, a tiny redhead, was dwarfed by a larger-than-life photograph of her son, Randy, handsome and olive-skinned. It matched the giant magnet she’d plastered on her car—at the suggestion of her grief counselor—meant to warn other families wherever she drove: in love and memory of randall nuss and others.
More than a decade later, as journalists and policy makers tried to pinpoint where and how the opioid crisis began, images from the rainy rally in Abingdon would get recycled in news accounts, the prescient parents marching with their signs, and next to them Sister Beth standing defiant, a look on her face that projected equal parts anger for what had happened and worry for what was coming next.
*
The Purdue executives had flown in on a private jet from Connecticut the night before for the sentencing hearing, staying at the elegant, historic Martha Washington Inn, conveniently located next to the courthouse. To avoid the protesters, their attorneys had asked the judge for permission to enter the two-story courthouse by a back door.
But Judge James Jones, a straight shooter with a booming voice, had watched his docket be overtaken by OxyContin-related crime.
No, Judge Jones ordered, the executives would enter through the front door of the courthouse just like everyone else.
Barry Meier stood off to the side, taking it all in. He’d been to Abingdon once before, in May, when Udell, Goldenheim, and Friedman made their first visit, to deliver their guilty pleas. Meier wanted to witness that occasion so badly that he’d arrived the night before, staying in a motel on the outskirts of Abingdon. And he wanted his appearance to be a surprise. He and a freelance photographer the New York Times hired from Roanoke would hide out near the front of the hotel, ducked between parked cars, staking out the executives.
Meier had interviewed the men many times before in their corporate offices and on the phone, but he wanted to witness their Appalachian reckoning firsthand.
It was his fifty-eighth birthday, and the veteran journalist could not have been happier with his gift.
“Everything I’d written was now justified,” he told me.
As he and the photographer stood up, Udell, Goldenheim, and Friedman seemed stunned to see them, Meier recalled. Goldenheim, the scientist, stared steely-eyed toward the camera while Udell and Friedman glanced quickly away.
*
In a rally before the sentencing hearing, the parents took turns reading the names of the dead. Bisch had printed them out from his message board memorials, now so numerous that the document was more than fifty pages long. Their voices broke periodically as they choked out the names.
Bobby Lee Ashcraft Jr., aged nineteen
Paul Aboata, twenty-two
Heather Marie Goslinowski, fifteen
Nicole Notaro, nineteen
They got through only ten pages before the hearing began.
In a photograph that ran in the next day’s New York Times, two moms in matching rain scarves held each other, one clutching a poster of her seventeen-year-old daughter: in loving memory of sarah nicole. her life was a life worth living. Behind them stood Van Rooyan in her sundress—blue, for her son’s favorite color—holding her prepared remarks.
Before the day was over, the executives would hear themselves described as corporate drug lords and marketing tricksters, on a par with Colombian cartels and P. T. Barnum. They would be asked to imagine themselves in the shoes of a parent of a college junior: “What if it was your son or daughter you saw in the morgue when we went there, and he was autopsied, sliced and diced?”
The executives would have their integrity questioned and their futures threatened. “I will reach out to any organization that Mr. Friedman speaks to about having a member of his family survive the