Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,49

by a national media that paid little attention to rural, predominantly white places like St. Charles or Bassett, where the country’s much-hailed economic recovery had definitely not trickled down.

At the same time, it had never been within the purview of local papers like the Martinsville Bulletin to investigate what was happening with international trade in Washington or New York, much less the latest push by Big Pharma or global drug cartels. And regional newspapers like my own Roanoke Times had drastically shrunk their coverage to a mainly urban and suburban core, ignoring the increasingly distressed communities in our hinterlands just when reporting on those places was needed the most.

Those of us living highly curated and time-strapped lives in cities across America—predominantly mixing virtually and physically with people whose views echoed our own—had no idea how politically and economically splintered our nation had become. And also how much poorer and sicker and work-starved the already struggling parts of the nation truly were—because we didn’t follow that story.

We may feel more connected by our cellphones and computers, but in reality we are more divided than ever before.

In the midsized city where I live, OxyContin continued to be viewed as a rural problem into the early 2010s—a problem in the coalfields, some four hours to the west. While the Roanoke Times covered the 2007 sentencing hearing of Purdue Pharma executives, it rarely mentioned OxyContin after that. We in Roanoke had heard opioid abuse was seeping into distressed factory towns like those in Henry County, but very rarely did our newspaper report on it.

We were safe in our ignorance, or so we thought—content to stereotype drug addiction as the affliction of jobless hillbillies, a small group of inner-city blacks, and a few misguided suburban kids.

But another invisible hand was upon us.

Heinrich Dreser’s drug moved seamlessly across city and county lines, with zero regard for politics, race, neighborhood, or class.

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I didn’t understand the connection between rural poverty, disability, and opioid addiction until I learned more about the accidental Bassett Furniture arsonist. Turned out he’d arrived at his copper heist on the outskirts of Bassett on his bicycle—a rare sight in the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“He was one of the unemployed masses; he did not have a paying job,” said the prosecutor (now a judge) in his case. “But his crime actually required work, so he wasn’t lazy so much as he was desperate.” Like so many of the region’s petty thieves, the arsonist was propelled by fear of becoming dopesick, added another local prosecutor, who told me that 75 percent of all police calls in the county now involved heroin or methamphetamine, or, increasingly, a combination of both.

Not only were rates of unemployment, disability, and opioid addiction soaring, but there was also renewed interested in methamphetamines and the practice of switching between opioids (in the form of either pills or their much cheaper cousin, heroin) and meth. “Crystal meth controls all the dockets now” in rural Virginia, a local drug task force officer told me. “If you’re addicted to painkillers, you become so lethargic you can hardly function. But meth keeps you going if you need to run the streets to go get your next dose of heroin or pills, to keep you from getting sick. It allows you to function. There’s a reason they call it ‘high-speed chicken feed.’”

I thought immediately of Spencer Mumpower’s 2010 jail mug shot. So much separated Spencer, whose mother had sent him to private school and then paid for fifteen different rehabs, from the young man who stripped copper wire out of the abandoned furniture factory. A scrawny junkie with sunken eyes and sticky-out collarbones, as Spencer described himself to me in 2012, “I looked ridiculous, like I had chicken pox. Like I’d stuck my head down a groundhog’s lair.”

But I had failed, just as the police and parents had, to connect young adults like Spencer to the rural addicted, even though Spencer told me he’d come to his heroin addiction the same way they had—through prescription opioid pills.

Our culture seems to excuse drug- and other risk-taking in white middle- and upper-middle-class kids, especially young men. The same liberties, when taken by rural poor whites or people of color—wherever they live—come across as more desperate, born of fundamental wants or needs that can’t be satisfied. But as I’ve come to learn, gauged strictly by drug use, there is no less urgency and desperation in America’s middle and upper classes today.

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Drug epidemics unfold “like a vector phenomenon,