Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,47
karate instructor, Rikk Perez, had become a father figure to him; Spencer was estranged, off and on, from his own dad. Perez taught Spencer exercises he could practice in his cell, like slow foot taps that progress up a cinder-block wall.
Being fit brought Spencer a feeling of confidence as he left for prison, where he hoped to finish his bachelor’s degree. After his release, he planned to dedicate himself to helping young people with addiction, in memory of Scott Roth.
I called Robin the day Spencer’s mom helped him report to prison. She said knowing that Spencer was behind bars again brought her no comfort.
“I hurt as much today as the day my son died,” she said, choking up. “I pray for Spencer every day, that he’ll be strong. My heart’s breaking for that kid. But it’s the only shot he has at a normal life—to get some accountability.”
As the months wore on, Robin began to soften toward Spencer. That fall, she started spending her Friday nights with troubled teenagers and their worried parents in a setting similar to the court-ordered Saturday sessions where Spencer had spoken.
She was learning that in her loss, she was far from alone. She and Ginger both were beginning to see that all the sunflowers and speeches in the world would not slow the epidemic’s spread. Ginger, a minor celebrity in town from her own ads for her business as well as from a failed campaign for state delegate, was recognized as a friendly face. At her new Ginger’s Jewelry store, a day rarely passed when someone didn’t show up at her counter wanting advice on something other than gold. Distraught parents might pretend to shop for a few minutes, but before long they’d mention the newspaper articles, and the tear-filled stories would tumble out.
A pastor’s wife with two addicted sons drove from two hours away to search her out. A sixty-three-year-old nurse was struggling to take care of her infant grandson because her twenty-five-year-old heroin-addicted daughter could not.
While Ronnie Jones was establishing his clientele in the northern Shenandoah Valley, young people in Roanoke were driving right past Woodstock on their way to Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Newark, or taking the Chinatown bus to New York, where they could pay $100 for fifty bags of heroin, stamped with names like Blue Magic or Gucci, then resell them in Roanoke for six to eight times their investment.
A drug-use survey of Roanoke-area high school students bore out the trend. In the fall of 2012, 6.4 percent reported using heroin one or more times, and almost 10 percent said they’d tried illicit prescription drugs. A local prevention counselor warned that the two percentages were in the process of flipping because heroin was becoming so much cheaper and easier to get.
The Families Anonymous meetings in town were filling up. Six years had passed since the weathermen’s final forecast, and the storm had settled in.
While Robin Roth searched for solace in sunflowers and Ginger Mumpower relaxed for the first time in years—knowing that in prison, at least, her son would likely not die of a drug overdose—parents up and down America’s heroin highways struggled to find the right culprit, or set of culprits, to blame.
But mostly they kept quiet about it, shut down in their grief and their shame.
Hidden Valley High School, Roanoke County, Virginia
Chapter Six
“Like Shooting Jesus”
An hour south of Roanoke, in a part of the state once dominated by unfettered industry, Martinsville, Virginia, was stuck in an economic morass. In 2012 the small city of thirteen thousand laid claim to having the highest unemployment rate in Virginia for twelve years. For most of the twentieth century, it had been the state’s industrial powerhouse, packed with textile and furniture factories, home to more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation. But nearly half its jobs went away when the millionaires sent the textile work to Honduras and Mexico in the wake of NAFTA in 1994, and the furniture jobs to China after that.
Bill Clinton had predicted that China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization would eventually create a “win-win” for workers. American companies would theoretically be able to export products to China’s growing consumer class, an argument Wall Street championed when stock prices climbed with every new plant-closing announcement. Corporate shareholders and CEOs ate up Clinton’s prediction, a cheery best-case version of Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century “invisible hand.” As the economists described it, Chinese peasants would better their lot by making chairs in factories, while dislocated American workers