Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,57

fucking spiritual experience. He was twenty years old.

“I felt terrible,” he remembered. “From Colton dying, and I knew I’d hurt my family a ton.” He was tired of trawling for purses in mall parking lots when most of the car doors were locked. “I was not having enough money to get high, I’d been stealing too much, and I hated it. This time, I wanted it [sobriety] for myself.”

As of this writing, Christopher has remained sober four years. At twenty-four, he’s back in college, this time in Dallas, the city where he landed after Montana to live in a sober house for young men transitioning from rehab to recovery. Offered a drink on his twenty-first birthday, Christopher told a waitress, “I’m allergic to alcohol.”

He was spending a lot of time “giving back” to the recovery community, mentoring young people who are newly sober, helping them work the twelve steps—and worrying about his mom as she increasingly devoted herself to helping other addicted people access treatment, calling rehabs, picking them up off the streets, and taking them to homeless shelters. His surgeon dad has even been known to give Jamie’s cellphone number out to addicted patients he meets in the ER.

“There’s a lot of emotional investment in it for her, but she’s not an addict and doesn’t totally understand, still, that some of the people she deals with are going to die. And the small percentage of people who do end up getting better may end up” relapsing, Christopher said, especially those who can’t afford multiple rehabs and aftercare.

How many addicts, after all, have moms who can afford not just to send their dopesick son to a second $30,000 rehab but also to accompany him on his flight to Montana so he won’t, at the last minute, back out?

Christopher knows he’s in a rarefied position: Fewer than one-quarter of heroin addicts who receive abstinence-only counseling and support remain clean two or more years. The recovery rate is higher, roughly 40 to 60 percent, among those who get counseling, support group, and medication-assisted treatment such as methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone.

“We know from other countries that when people stick with treatment, outcomes can be even better than fifty percent,” Lembke, the addiction specialist, told me. But most people in the United States don’t have access to good opioid-addiction treatment, she said, acknowledging the plethora of cash-only MAT clinics that resemble pill-mill pain clinics as well as rehabs that remain staunchly anti-MAT.

All told, Christopher had lost four close friends to opioid overdose, including Colton Banks and Scott Roth. For Brian, the number was also four.

None of the recovering users I interviewed had been in the military, but they tallied their losses with the sorrowful stoicism of veterans who’d been to war.

Near the tail end of Spencer Mumpower’s prison sentence, he had lost twelve friends, and five others were now in prison or jail. “He’s had very few friends get clean, either through going to rehab or jail, but the ones who didn’t are either dead, or they have parents who enable them, and they continue to do drugs,” Ginger Mumpower said. “Most of his friends have never seen jail; they either talk their way out, or their parents buy their way out.”

When Colton Banks died, in 2012, for every one opioid-overdose death, there were 130 opioid-dependent Americans who were still out there, still using the drugs.

George’s Chicken, Edinburg, Virginia

Chapter Seven

FUBI

In the picturesque Shenandoah Valley town of Woodstock, more than two hours north of Roanoke, bulk heroin cut in a Harlem lab had just made its way down I-81. It was the last thing Shenandoah County sergeant Brent Lutz, a Woodstock native, would have expected to find himself doing: stalking a major heroin dealer. But here he was, at all hours of the day and night, clutching a pair of binoculars while crouched in the upstairs bedroom of his cousin’s house a few miles outside of town. He’d spent so much time there in recent days that the mile-wide stench of chicken entrails coming from George’s Chicken across the road no longer bothered him.

Lutz was tracking the movements of Charles Smith and Pete Butler, suspected dealers in a newly arrived drug ring. Butler lived in a marigold-colored boardinghouse called Alma’s, full of chicken-processing-plant employees, while Smith lived in a trailer park with his girlfriend behind the giant plant. Confidential informants had told Lutz that the men, former drug offenders who’d landed in town a year earlier to work at the plant via the Virginia prison