Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,43

It became her favorite place, her favorite thing to do, standing in the sunflower grove, listening to the wind chimes on a nearby apple tree that Scott had planted for her one long-ago Mother’s Day. She felt closest to him there, especially when the wind whipped down Sugar Loaf Mountain and through her subdivision, the chimes banging out their bittersweet tune.

That summer, Robin brought a cardboard box full of sunflower seeds for me to our first interview, wrapped up in a bow. Sunflowers were her touchstone, not unlike the 55 on Jesse Bolstridge’s football jersey. She texted me pictures of them repeatedly, along with snapshots of her very happy and very silly knife-wielding Vanilla Rice. She shared her favorite-ever picture, of a ten-year-old Scotty, the classic headless-at-the-beach trick where he’s buried in sand up to his neck.

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In Roanoke, 2012 was the tail end of the epidemic’s stealth phase. Two hours up I-81 in the rolling farming country of the northern Shenandoah Valley, the epidemic was now rearing its head, too—though mostly still in pill form—and the news of its presence was even slower to emerge.

Jesse Bolstridge was now in high school and trading his ADHD medication Adderall to classmates who liked the way it allowed them to drink all night without passing out. In exchange, they plied him with painkillers, either bought on the black market or pilfered from their parents’ or grandparents’ medicine cabinets.

Like most parents of the addicted, Kristi Fernandez can’t pinpoint the moment when her son’s life became hostage to prescription pills. It was sometime after Jesse was diagnosed with Lyme meningitis at fifteen, sometime in between the half dozen high school football and snowboarding injuries that landed him in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms, where he was prescribed opioid painkillers including Oxycodone, Vicodin, and Percocet “thirties,” as he later referred to the 30-milligram pills, his drug of choice.

“The boy had so many rounds of stitches, so many concussions and broken bones from playing football, I lost track,” Kristi said. By his junior year, Jesse had sustained so many concussions that a neurologist told her he’d have to quit football if he got injured again.

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What Kristi didn’t understand then was how much the drugs calmed him, dulled the purr of his motor, made him feel “normal,” as he would later confide. She didn’t know then, either, that Jesse and his friends were trading the bought and stolen pills around widely at so-called pharm parties.

Kristi remembers the first time someone in town suggested her son had a pill problem. Jesse had spent the night at a friend’s, and the friend’s mother called to accuse him of stealing Percocet from her bathroom cabinet. Kristi defended her son, even suggesting that it had been the woman’s son, not Jesse, who swiped the pills.

The manager of a temp agency, Kristi is a businesswoman. Civic-minded, she has always followed the news about nearby towns Strasburg and Woodstock. But the only 2010 stories that would have been of relevance to her son’s story had been occluded by bigger, headline-making news: the attempted bank robbery by a local young man, someone she didn’t then know. One among a small but growing group of area heroin users, Brandon Perullo had become so desperate in his dopesickness that he tried to rob a bank, donning a bandana and a black hoodie. He entered the bank twice before demanding cash by handing the teller a threatening note, but his jittery demeanor had already given him away. Brandon was arrested, unarmed, as he exited the building with $1,860 in cash.

At his February 2011 sentencing hearing, the twenty-seven-year-old described the growing problem in the region, offering to tell his story to teenagers to warn them away from the drug. “No mistake is too big that I can’t bounce back from,” Brandon told the judge, who sentenced him to three and a half years in prison.

In a quaint town full of historical markers and pricey antiques, the bank robbery in Woodstock made headlines across the Shenandoah Valley. Brandon’s mother, Laura Hadden, begged the local newspaper to write about the growing heroin scourge. Her son wasn’t the only one buying pills and heroin from mules and commuter dealers driving to Baltimore, she told an editor. “But they blew me off. It was more interesting to write about my son being arrested for robbing a bank!” she said.

Just before Brandon left for prison, in 2011, the local sheriff teamed with school prevention workers to hold the first community-wide meeting about opioid addiction.

Stigma