in their late teens and twenties didn’t often die from booze.
The real perfect storm fueling the opioid epidemic had been the collapse of work, followed by the rise in disability and its parallel, pernicious twin: the flood of painkillers pushed by rapacious pharma companies and regulators who approved one opioid pill after another. Declining workforce participation wasn’t just a rural problem anymore; it was everywhere, albeit to a lesser degree in areas with physicians who prescribed fewer opioids and higher rates of college graduates. As Monnat put it: “When work no longer becomes an option for people, what you have at the base is a structural problem, where the American dream becomes a scam.”
She likened the epidemic’s spread not to crabgrass but to a wildfire: “If the economic collapse was the kindling in this epidemic, the opiates were the spark that lit the fire.”
And the helicopters were nowhere in sight.
*
By the spring of 2013, Lutz still didn’t know D.C.’s real name or what he looked like. But he had pieced together an impressive dossier of details: D.C. was African American, in his midthirties, with no tattoos. He drove a silver, older-model Mercedes SUV, nice but not too flashy, no custom rims. His heroin was said to enter Virginia’s I-81 corridor in plastic Walmart bags, tucked inside snack containers carried by young women riding the Chinatown bus from New York, earning $300 to $500 per round trip.
Packaged in Harlem, the heroin was shaped into uniform, four-ounce hockey-puck-shaped disks that nestled snuggly inside a Pringle’s can. Whoever was coordinating the production seemed to have a craving for a single flavor, cheddar cheese. And they were methodical, emptying the cans, then repacking them with four pucks and stacking a few Pringles at the end before resealing the tubes with a hot-glue gun. The mystery source also seemed to crave Nilla Wafers and Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies, using those empty packages to transport powder cocaine, which Butler and Smith cooked into crack, Lutz later learned.
An ex-offender who had long dealt in crack and marijuana, D.C. at first had no idea what to do with the Pringles pucks when they landed in Woodstock. So he hired Smith and Butler to break them down into dosage-sized units, or tenths of a gram. In fact, D.C. was so afraid of the drug that he wore rubber gloves, goggles, and a face mask while Smith and Butler cut and packaged the heroin into bags, called points or tenths—on the other side of his living room.
“He looked like he was doing surgery,” one of his subordinate dealers told me. “He was way too scared of heroin to ever use it.” Like many black heroin users and dealers, D.C. pronounced his product “herr-on,” as in: None of my friends or close associates does herr-on. I wouldn’t even know where to put the needle.
But from the first moment he sent one of his subordinate dealers out in Woodstock to sell a gram’s worth of heroin he’d paid $65 for in Harlem—and the dealer returned with $800 in cash—D.C. was hooked on another drug.
“What you sell up in the city, you can double down [your profits] here,” said an investigator on the case. “You don’t have the competition in the small towns, and you don’t have people shooting at you.”
Whereas commuter dealers running to Baltimore were bringing in 20 grams—at most—D.C.’s Pringles haul routinely contained 200 grams.
*
Lutz crouched beneath the window, waiting for the Mercedes and thinking about his fiancée back home, still pissed that he’d been called out to work on Christmas Day. At a family wedding in Florida, he’d spent most of his time on his cellphone, monitoring an investigation of the latest overdose. When his cellphone rang at night, his fiancée’s kids moaned loudly about him leaving, again, for work. As the county’s point man for drug activity, he was now getting, on average, one phone call a night.
Ever since the 2010 reformulation of OxyContin, Lutz had been tracking a small cluster of heroin users, most of them young white men who made the two-hour drive to Baltimore, a longtime heroin stronghold, on a near-daily basis. They’d buy enough to use, plus extra to sell to friends, making enough to fund both their next fix and gas for the trip to get the fix after that. Police classified them as commuter-dealers, and they were becoming an important subset of the drug trade in Baltimore, where heroin sales were estimated at $1.5 million every day.