Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,132
attempting to make a night deposit: Harless Rose was sentenced to life in prison for murdering the thirty-five-year-old store manager, Timothy Hughes; author interview, Richard Stallard, March 3, 2017; and “Life Term Imposed in Wise Slaying,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 31, 2003 (wire reports).
a man made the bold move: Billy Gene Lawson fired a shot at two young men trying to get his wife’s pills, shooting twenty-six-year-old Shannon Fleenor in the back of the head. Lawson was charged with second-degree murder, but a jury of twelve county residents voted to acquit; author interview, Stallard.
“‘spot and steal’”: Author interview, Rev. Clyde Hester, March 3, 2017.
petition drive asking the FDA: Originally at recalloxycontinnow, but the website is no longer live.
“In a place where people barely have money”: Author interview, Stravino.
“the crack of Southwest Virginia”: Hammack, “Deaths from OxyContin Overdoses on the Rise.”
marked the first time in the agency’s history: GAO report, “OxyContin Abuse and Diversion,” 36. Laurence Hammack, “OxyContin,” Roanoke Times, June 10, 2001.
ten-point plan to curb abuse: Ibid.
pills taped to their back: Author interview, Stallard.
black-box warning on the drug: Reuters Health, “Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin to Get Black Box Warning,” July 25, 2001.
It was now possible for a rep: Author interviews, former Purdue sales reps, Jan. 26 and Nov. 1, 2017.
“The issue is drug abuse, not the drug”: Laurence Hammack, “Seeing OxyContin Abuse Firsthand Pushes St. Charles Doctor’s Petition,” Roanoke Times, Nov. 25, 2001.
“We are an average family”: Meier, Pain Killer, 138; author interview with banker, name withheld by request, Jan. 12, 2017.
“‘tremendous insult’”: Author interview, Kobak, March 3, 2017.
the newspaper ad never ran: Meier, Pain Killer, 140.
The next day Friedman gathered with: Author interview, Stewart, Sept. 23, 2016; banker interview (name withheld by request), Jan. 12, 2017; and Meier, Pain Killer, 140–42 .
“except broken bodies”: Author interview, Kobak.
executives might be able to intimidate the people: Author interview, Sister Beth Davies, Aug. 10, 2016. “Beth, my hands are tied,” she remembered her former student telling her, apologetically.
Sister Beth had stood up to a crowd: Greg Edwards, “Plant Moves to Clean Up Spill,” Roanoke Times, Oct. 31, 1996.
That event pitted company miners: Author interview via email, Sister Beth Davies, Feb. 3, 2017.
“She was absolutely the most fearless”: Author interview, Tony Lawson, Jan. 30, 2017.
“Greed makes people violent”: “A Connecticut Yankee Meets Ol’ King Coal,” excerpted from John G. Deedy, The New Nuns: Serving Where the Spirit Leads (Chicago: Fides/Claretian, 1982), in Salt, September 1982.
all the mining-company executives who’d flown in: Author interview, Davies, Sept. 22, 2016.
she was wearing the same gray sweatpants: Hammack, “Lee County Is the Epicenter of Abuse.”
CHAPTER THREE. MESSAGE BOARD MEMORIAL
Interviews: Dr. Steve Huff, Ed Bisch, David Courtwright, Eric Wish, Nancy D. Campbell, Lee Nuss, Barbara Van Rooyan, Dr. Art Van Zee, Dr. Steve Gelfand, Richard Ausness, Laurence Hammack, Barry Meier, Lisa Nina McCauley Green, Lt. Richard Stallard, Randy Ramseyer, John Brownlee
New York Times reporter Barry Meier and a colleague: Francis X. Clines with Barry Meier, “Cancer Painkillers Pose New Abuse Threat,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 2001.
The news was disseminating, finally: Paul Tough, “The Alchemy of OxyContin,” New York Times Magazine, July 29, 2001. The extent of the spread of the drug was also chronicled early on by Seamus McGraw, “The Most Dangerous Drug to Hit Small-Town America Since Crack Cocaine?,” Spin, July 2001.
“pharming”: Author interview, Dr. Steve Huff, Sept. 27, 2017.
his son was dead from it: Author interview, Ed Bisch, Jan. 26, 2017.
“After the old-time addicts died out”: Author interview, David Courtwright, July 21, 2016.
hipster counterculture: Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 148–52.
Progressive doctors championed the carefully restricted use: Courtwright, “Preventing and Treating Narcotic Addiction—A Century of Federal Drug Control,” New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 26, 2015.
“sour, puritanical shits”: Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, April 25, 1955: Oliver Harris, ed., The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (New York: Penguin, 1994), 273.
they returned to spread-out social networks: Lee N. Robins et al., “Vietnam Veterans Three Years After Vietnam: How Our Study Changed Our View of Heroin,” American Journal on Addictions, May 2010: 203–211; author interview, Eric Wish, April 22, 2016.
the veterans who continued to struggle with addiction: Author interview, historian Nancy D. Campbell, Aug. 9, 2017.
“In the early 1990s, probably ninety percent”: Author interview, Courtwright.
bluntest moniker he could think of: After some heated exchanges with Purdue that ended with the company giving him a $10,000 “grant” for equipment to facilitate drug-awareness presentations, Bisch was persuaded to change the name to OxyAbuseKills, a decision he later regretted. “I was duped,”