Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,77

portrait of the American president James Garfield above his desk. Before he was named brigadier general in command of twenty-five hundred U.S. Army Reservists nationwide, Andrew Bassford was tasked with the job of laying a wreath on the grave of each one of the eight Ohio-born presidents on the anniversary of his birth, then delivering a speech. Bassford viewed it as tedious but important work, the challenge being to say something inspiring while not repeating what he’d expounded on the year before.

Compared with the other Ohio presidents, Garfield is, in Bassford’s view, an overlooked gem. He was a beast of a worker, his rags-to-riches story so inspiring that Horatio Alger penned his campaign biography. Among Bassford’s favorite Garfield quotes: “Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification. They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.”

Bassford is also the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of prosecuting many of western Virginia’s heroin-distribution and overdose-death cases. That’s his primary job, the brigadier general position being a part-time gig that takes him out of town on weekends twice a month. He takes being a prosecutor seriously, this important but sometimes tedious business of sending people like Ashlyn Kessler and Spencer Mumpower to prison—though he’s the first to admit the system is inept and flawed.

From his high-and-tight haircut to his dress cowboy boots, Bassford exudes law and order, communicating in staccato sentences and wry one-liners, like a character from the television series Dragnet. On the timing of illicit drug sales, for instance: “Heroin is morning, crack is night.”

On the federal judge who halved the prison time specified by Ashlyn’s plea agreement, saying he was impressed by her perseverance, after her arrest, in a jail-based treatment program: “I think Judge Urbanski is trying to save those that he thinks can be saved.” (In 2017, Urbanski knocked Ashlyn’s sentence down even more.)

On what he thinks of law enforcement’s efforts to quell the opioid epidemic: Not much.

The system is too rigidified, as Garfield would say, not nimble enough to combat heroin’s exponential growth. The drug’s too addictive, the money too good. “You whack one [dealer], and the others just pop right up, like Whac-A-Mole,” Bassford said.

Bassford prosecuted Ashlyn and her dealer in 2015, but only after putting away her first heroin dealer, from southeast Roanoke, the white working-class neighborhood where heroin initially took hold in the city. Thirty-year-old Orlando Cotto had enlisted his girlfriend, his twin brother, an uncle, and a next-door neighbor to help him transport 60 grams of heroin every two weeks for distribution and use. They took turns meeting their supplier in the parking lot of a Burlington Coat Factory in Claymont, Delaware, clearing nearly $60,000 a month.

After Ashlyn went to jail, “I whacked four more,” Bassford said of subsequent dealers, all intertwined with Ashlyn’s and Cotto’s networks.

But the demand for heroin persisted, predicated on the evangelical model of users recruiting new users, and Bassford’s whacks could not keep pace. “We’ll score a huge drug bust that we’ve been working on for maybe a year, and all that does is create a vacuum in the market that lasts maybe five to seven days,” said Isaac Van Patten, a Radford University criminologist and data analyst for Roanoke city police. “And because the amounts of money involved are so vast, we’re not going to stamp it out.

“We don’t enjoy the cooperation of the supplier nations,” Van Patten explained, referring to drug-cartel production in western Mexico, South America, and Afghanistan, with profits estimated at more than $300 billion a year. “Their attitude is: ‘Tell your people who are wanting to consume our product, we’re going to supply it.’”

While Roanoke’s quietest heroin users were privileged and upper-middle-class—Van Patten called them the café crowd—it didn’t take long before suburban users like Ashlyn were casting their lot with former OxyContin addicts from the working-class Southeast who were already tapped into illicit networks, he said. “In the suburbs, heroin started out as a trendy drug that people believed they could control. But the rich kids spiraled right down with everybody else and then, suddenly, you couldn’t tell between the two.”

The rich kids were crashing alongside the poor kids on friends’ couches (the lucky ones, anyway), all of them cowering before the morphine molecule and beholden to its spell. Fifteen years earlier, Art Van Zee had predicted that OxyContin would eventually be recalled—but not until rich kids in the