Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,41

a star of the growing Brain City constellation—I struggled to understand how Bickel’s research applied to the real-life heroin users I knew, some of whom were now trading sex for drug money a few blocks from his office.

Could a Bickel-designed app have prevented Jesse Bolstridge’s death? Where was the hope? When I asked him those questions, he pointed to a framed Chinese proverb that he takes inspiration from: “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”

But the larger question about hope continued to reverberate wherever I went. I heard a version of it from an overwhelmed family friend, who pulled me aside at a wedding party to tell me about her thirty-four-year-old addicted daughter and pleaded with me through tears: “Just tell me one thing, what can your book do to help me keep my daughter alive?”

My friend was discovering the same thing through experience that I was through my interviews: that the legal and medical structures meant to combat America’s heroin epidemic were woefully disconnected, often at odds with one another, and full of unintended consequences.

*

A crack-turned-heroin-dealer with Philadelphia roots landed in Roanoke in 2006, the same time the weathermen began sweating through their long-sleeved shirts. Clifton “Lite” Lee made heroin an equal-opportunity drug, connecting with drug users, black and white, and figuring—correctly—that he could easily double his profit margin if he imported the drug to comparatively staid Roanoke rather than continue selling it solely in New Jersey and New York. When police caught two suburban teenagers middlemanning for Lee—selling heroin to their friends and keeping some for their own use—they were stunned by what their cellphones revealed: evidence implicating fifty other kids they’d been selling heroin to. Most attended Hidden Valley High School, in outlying Roanoke County’s wealthiest neighborhood, home to insurance agents and doctors and lawyers.

“Lee was the guy willing to get the kids involved,” Wolthuis said, pulling out a handwritten organizational chart he’d put together to help him keep visual track. At the top of the pyramid were the nonusers like Lee, who were in it just for the money, and at the bottom were the addicted, including some whose names were crossed out—dead of overdose.

By the time Lee was sentenced to eleven years in prison, in 2008, prosecutors had pinned him with bringing a thousand bags of heroin into the region two to three times a week, paying $5,000 for twenty bricks of heroin that his network then sold for $30,000.

The growth in heroin users was as exponential as its 600 percent profit margin. The first bags sold in Roanoke were stamped with the names Funeral and Green Frog, and some had a purity of 90 percent, a concentration that addicted users quickly and made the dosages deadlier.

“I can remember lying in bed awake at night, thinking, how far is this thing gonna go?” Wolthuis said. “If you have a guy doing a chain of bank robberies, you catch him and the robberies stop.” But the problem with heroin is the lure of the morphine molecule. Herr-on is my girlfriend. Even as Wolthuis locked up the perpetrators, he suspected that the demand for heroin was already too entrenched. There were still plenty of user-sellers eager to get on the nearest heroin highway to fetch a new batch from Baltimore or Richmond or Paterson, New Jersey. Unlike Ronnie Jones and Clifton Lee, they didn’t aspire to get rich dealing dope. They just wanted to keep from getting dopesick.

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The story of Clifton Lee and the addicts he serviced and created didn’t trickle down to me at the newspaper, where I wrote about family issues, until 2010. That year, the region’s only heroin-overdose death made headlines, not because it was unique but because it involved the twenty-one-year-old son of a prominent white businesswoman.

No one was paying attention to heroin arrests when they only concerned the children of inner-city black families. A 2009 Roanoke Times story suggesting that heroin was now closing in on the illicit use of OxyContin and prescribed fentanyl patches in popularity seemed to draw shrugs, even as one prosecutor publicly warned, “They’re skipping over pot and going straight to heroin.”

Wolthuis may have been lying in bed worrying about Spencer Mumpower’s role in his classmate Scott Roth’s death, but no one, not even the do-gooders giving drug-prevention lectures in local high schools, talked about the kids left behind who were still using. It was as if heroin had settled peaceably into Hidden Valley, with its manicured lawns and attached multiple-car garages, and