Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,39

levels below him amid a [sales] hierarchy that was not remotely within his purview.”

*

Jones said the case was not only the largest he’d ever presided over, in terms of the fine, but also the most dramatic. There was a hard rain that day, he recalled, and yet there were so many people in attendance that the court set up a separate overflow room for observers to watch via video.

Nor would he ever forget the most heart-wrenching portion of the parent testimony—that of Fishtown native Lee Nuss, who described how her only son, Randy, died as he was getting ready to leave for culinary school in 2003. “His prepaid college ended up paying for his funeral,” Nuss said.

Nuss had begged the judge to reject the terms of the plea agreement, imploring him, “Money means nothing to them. Let the punishment fit the crime.”

Then she brandished the tiny brass urn she carried whenever she traveled, the one Purdue lawyers had gotten ejected from Karen White’s whistle-blower trial. Randy had begun as dust, in her belief, and unto dust he had prematurely returned. She clutched his ashes as she stepped down from the stand.

“This is from your drug, OxyContin, and here he is in this courtroom,” Nuss said, staring steely-eyed at Udell, Friedman, and Goldenheim.

A reporter sitting in the courtroom thought for a moment she was going to throw the urn at the men. But Nuss waved it instead and returned to her seat.

She had wanted the men to apologize, to admit that they had understood all along that OxyContin wasn’t a novel way of fighting pain but simply a different and more potent way of dispensing nature’s oldest drug.

If the Sacklers’ lieutenants had legitimately not known about the flood of pills unleashed by sales reps toting around bad data and free shrubbery twenty-five rungs down the corporate ladder from them, maybe it was because they had not cared to look.

PART TWO

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Hidden Valley, Roanoke County, Virginia

Strasburg High School, Strasburg, Virginia

Chapter Five

Suburban Sprawl

Awareness of the opioid crisis has typically come in waves, often celebrity-studded and well covered by the media: the death by overdose of Philip Seymour Hoffman, in 2014, then two years later the death of Prince. But for ordinary citizens, the news that opioids had crossed over from Not me and not anyone I know to mainstream traveled more slowly, in dribs and drabs, maybe when the Cincinnati Enquirer became the first newspaper in the country to dedicate a reporter solely to the heroin beat.

Four hours east of Lee County, in a southern city that counts the local TV weathermen among its biggest celebrities, the February 2006 news that meteorologists Jamey Singleton and Marc Lamarre had been shooting up heroin stunned viewers of the NBC affiliate station in Roanoke, where I live. The story broke after Lamarre suffered a near-fatal overdose at a party, an event that drew local police and, eventually, the attention of federal authorities.

Viewers loved watching them both, especially the stylish, tanned Lamarre, poised and confident, his hands gesturing fluidly in front of the weather map’s green screen. Back then, it was still hard to picture a thirty-six-year-old collapsed on an apartment floor in an affluent Roanoke suburb, harder still to imagine a world where educated, well-paid white guys felt the need to disappear into bathrooms at parties or, worse, as in Lamarre’s case, end up being tossed into a bathtub and doused with cold water and ice in the hope of waking him up.

“The weathermen were skin popping,” recalled police chief Chris Perkins, then an undercover Roanoke detective. The term referred to the practice of injecting the heroin under the skin, rather than directly into a vein, for a milder high—the idea being that skin popping gave you a better high than snorting heroin but wasn’t as potent or dangerous as intravenously injecting it.

But the weathermen were soon outed, as most users are, the sweat circles under the guys’ sport coats the first in a progressively sad series of giveaways.

“They’d been running around in eighty-degree weather in long sleeves,” Perkins said. “Young people were already starting to snort heroin, but then when the weathermen made the news, it started to become almost vogue, this notion that you could inject heroin and somehow still be functional.”

Perkins was working the city’s drug unit when the overdose call came in. He remembered finding Lamarre unconscious in the bathroom of his well-appointed apartment, before rescue squad workers arrived. Lamarre survived, barely, moving away from the