Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,58

system’s work-release program, were responsible for the recent surge in heroin-related crime in Shenandoah County. Not only did Smith and Butler have dozens of people working under them, many of them addicted, they also had a boss.

Over the next year, the story of that boss and his underlings would allow the young sergeant and his peers to pull the curtain back on the inner workings of a large-scale heroin ring for the first time.

Across the nation, police chiefs and sheriffs were beginning to lament, “We can’t arrest our way out of this epidemic.” That sentiment illuminated the folly of the decades-long War on Drugs, in which drug users are arrested four times more often than those who sell the drugs.

Sergeant Lutz’s government-financed odyssey would also illustrate just how expensive, difficult, and time-consuming enforcement strategies are—with $7.6 billion spent nationwide combating opioid-related crime in 2013 alone—compared with treating the addicted people who drive the demand.

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It was late 2012, and Lutz, thirty, had just returned to his job as lead narcotics investigator from a temporary assignment elsewhere in the sheriff’s department. Before he left, drug arrests in Woodstock, the county seat, were mostly related to black-market opioid pills: Roxicodone, or Roxy; Dilaudid; Percocet; and the like. His mother, a pharmacy assistant in the storied uptown drugstore with turquoise soda fountain counters and a handwritten charge-account ledger like something out of Happy Days, had first warned him about pill abuse more than a decade before, sharing stories of customers who claimed they’d accidentally spilled their prescription down the bathroom sink. The local emergency room was by now accustomed to the classic fake and fraud: a moaning patient claiming kidney stone pain and pleading for Dilaudid, also known as “that one that starts with a D.” Drug-seeking behavior was so common that it had spawned an Onion-style medical parody on a website called GomerBlog, which punchy health care workers across the state had gleefully called to my attention: “To kick off their new labeling, [the Dilaudid-making] company hopes to change the pain scale from a 0–10 to Tylenol-to–That One That Starts with a D,” the satirist wrote. (“You go crazy if you can’t laugh every now and then,” a nurse-practitioner told me.)

Farther out, in the foothills of the George Washington National Forest, people were still making methamphetamine, Lutz knew. In 2008, he had worked a notorious case, arresting some twenty locals and diversion-program inmates for smuggling meth-making materials out of George’s Chicken via an elaborate pulley system dangling from the plant’s roof.

Lutz thought he had seen everything at George’s Chicken, a plant manned by dislocated factory workers, young locals who lived just north of the poverty line, immigrants who’d managed to land a work visa (or a passable version of one), and an increasing number of workers whom Lutz referred to simply as “diversion,” as in: “Most of the trouble we get around here is from diversion.” A Virginia Department of Corrections initiative, the program aims to divert nonviolent felons from prison to employment, and to help them gain work experience that will ease the transition back to their communities after their sentences are complete. Most divertees hail from the urban centers of Roanoke, Richmond, and the Tidewater region, or outside Washington.

Lutz had met with managers at George’s Chicken numerous times. “We’re out there once a week at least—fights, drug-related stuff, overdoses in the company parking lot,” the sergeant said. “You ask them if they drug-test, and they say they do, but I doubt they watch ’em, so they can still bring in [clean] urine. As long as they got people coming and going to work, they don’t care.”

Lutz’s boss, Shenandoah County sheriff Tim Carter, told me the Department of Corrections was equally lax. “They put these people in this program, but they don’t put the resources to monitor them,” he said. A local probation officer, one of two overseeing the diversion workers at George’s, told me she was lucky to check in with them once a month. Among the divertees who stay after their sentences are complete, “very few of them earn enough money on their own to make expenses. So, they either commit new crimes, or they decide to give up and return back home. Or they abscond. They run.”

The plant had become such a sore point among local police that Lutz and his colleagues joked: “Forget building a Mexican border wall. What they should really build is a wall around George’s Chicken.”

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But the arrival of bulk heroin in Woodstock was more