Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,54

usual and worried about his weight loss; he’d dropped from 150 to 125 pounds. They asked him if he was anorexic.

A counselor he was seeing for anxiety set up an intervention of sorts in his office, inviting Brian’s parents to attend and beginning with “Brian wants to tell you about a problem he’s having.”

By then he was shooting up twenty bags a day, buying them from a host of user-dealers that had once included Spencer and Scott.

“I’m addicted to heroin,” he told his parents.

And while they were relieved to finally know why he’d lost so much weight—and why he sometimes stayed out until 3 or 4 a.m.—they were also gobsmacked.

They sent him to a local hospital to detox, then to intensive outpatient treatment, where he was prescribed the opioid-maintenance drug Suboxone, with mandatory urine screenings, one-on-one counseling, and support group meetings.

Brian was twenty-three years old and beginning to wean off Suboxone when I first interviewed him, in 2012.

“It’s been seven days today” since his last dose of Suboxone, he said. “I have pinprickly skin, and I’m restless. It’s hard to sit still.” Still mourning Scott’s death, he noted that none of his other user-dealer friends, with the exception of Spencer, had been caught.

“The cellphone is the glue that holds it all together for the modern drug user,” Brian told me. “In high school, I snuck out of the house a number of times to meet people at the bottom of the driveway, and my parents had no clue. Aside from taking my cellphone away, my parents also could have looked at my text message logs and gotten a sense of what was going on.”

*

At a Lutheran church on the outskirts of Hidden Valley, two moms of opioid-addicted young men met at a Families Anonymous meeting, where worried parents go for peer support. Not only would their chance meeting have lasting implications for families of the addicted in the region, but their stories would also expose how families operate inside the sizable gaps that have opened up between the two institutions tasked with addressing the opioid epidemic: the criminal justice and health care systems. While shame too often cloaks these gaps in secrecy, some doctors, drug dealers, and pharmaceutical companies continue to profit mightily from them. The addicted work to survive and stave off dopesickness while desperate family members and volunteers work to keep them alive.

Jamie Waldrop was a civic leader, the wife of a prominent surgeon. Drenna Banks and her husband ran a successful insurance agency. Their sons had been friends and used drugs together, crossing paths briefly through friends at North Cross, a private suburban school that Jamie’s son Christopher attended.

“I just knew [Jamie] was this cool blond-haired chick who was making me laugh at a time when I needed to laugh,” Drenna recalled. Jamie had not one but two children who’d become addicted, first to pills, then heroin. She hadn’t realized the depth of their addiction until she found them both passed out in separate incidents in her home—her oldest, breathing but slumped over in a chair from a combo of Xanax and painkillers, his cellphone fallen to the ground; her youngest, passed out on the bathroom floor, heroin needles and blood sprawled around him.

Between the outpatient Suboxone programs (none of which worked, the family said) and multiple residential rehabs and aftercare sober-house programs (two of which, eventually, did), the Waldrops would spend more than $300,000 on treatment—not counting the drug-related legal fees or the thousands in stolen checks and credit-card bills for gift cards, which were traded to dealers for drugs. (A $200 gift card goes for $120 worth of pills, Jamie explained.) “I was a pretty bad robber,” Christopher, her youngest, said.

Jamie and her husband can’t pinpoint the most frenzied moment in their journey. Maybe it was when they were scheduled to attend a medical conference at the Greenbrier, a storied five-star resort, but had to bring their grown sons along because they couldn’t trust them to stay home alone. Before the conference was over, they discovered a sizable drug stash hidden in a potted plant in their room.

Maybe it was when Jamie’s surgeon husband had to drive to the roughest part of the city to pay off one son’s drug-dealer debt. Or maybe it was the daily jewelry shuffle Jamie initiated in the wake of discovering her diamond necklace gone, along with her husband’s Rolex: She’d take what remained of her best jewelry, “the handed-down stuff,” and rotate it between an oatmeal container, the freezer,