Dreamland (13 page)

One dealer, known as El Gato, from the village of Aquiles Serdán, was especially aggressive. El Gato didn’t care what people said about him back home. Enrique admired that. El Gato wanted people to know that in his house, hunger was a thing of the past. El Gato came home with clothes, cars, ice chests full of American beer, and guns of various calibers.

“El Gato is everywhere and it won’t be easy to run him out,” his uncle said.

His uncles promised Enrique more money and a new truck in Mexico if he did well. With another driver, Enrique, properly inspired, patrolled the streets of the San Fernando Valley like the state trooper he once wanted to be—now looking for addicts. He’d give them a free sample and a phone number. Within a few weeks, Enrique raised the daily take to five thousand dollars.

Then, early one morning, police raided an uncle’s house. The other uncles had looked to this man for leadership. In the weeks that followed, Enrique saw his remaining uncles falter. Gang members robbed their drivers and they did nothing. Several times clients put knives to Enrique’s throat. He spit the balloons into their hands, remembering a saying from his father: “Die for what’s yours, but not for what’s others.”

More people arrived from Xalisco to sell the chiva. The heroin networks multiplied. El Gato’s workers began leaving him to start their own cells. There wasn’t much El Gato could do. Any retaliation in Canoga Park would cause issues back home, and bring LAPD attention. A friend Enrique knew from Xalisco came up and started his own network. Just started the cell right there in the Valley. Then El Gato surprised everyone. He took a junkie and chiva and opened a heroin cell down in San Diego. Before long, Enrique heard, El Gato had one going up in Portland as well. David Tejeda had that store going in Hawaii. These kinds of moves rocked the Xalisco heroin world in the San Fernando Valley. Above all, they showed the Xalisco Boys that they could find new markets, that the system could succeed far from the Valley’s Nayarit enclave.

Enrique, a kid of sixteen now, watched all this. As the business floundered under his uncles’ weak leadership, he and a friend bought a car and rented an apartment on the sly. For a while, without his uncles’ knowledge, he ran his own heroin tiendita on the side. But then a gang member robbed him, took his dope, and cut him. His uncles discovered his side business. They beat him for his temerity, gave him eighteen hundred dollars as payment for his months of work, and packed him off to Nayarit.

With that, the one escape from a life of sugarcane farming seemed closed to him forever. His return to the rancho was greeted less enthusiastically this time. His sisters smiled at the gifts, but he felt their disappointment. He had no other options. He went to work again in the fields with his father, who smirked and mocked him. As if to show up his son, his father installed a satellite dish outside the family shack. In Mexican ranchos at the time, satellite dishes, standing fifteen feet high, were one way a family showed neighbors that it had arrived. Didn’t matter if some days it got no reception, the towering pole and broad dish made a statement. His family had no decent bathroom, Enrique wryly observed, but it had a satellite dish. Still, his father was happy, so the family was relieved.

One day the land would be his, his father reminded him. Enrique should get used to that idea. But even that was years away. Without heroin, Enrique couldn’t imagine a life where he controlled his own decisions.

Harvest time came with heat and humidity that felt like boiling soup. Enrique made fifty pesos a load trucking the towering stacks of cut cane to the mill. In the fields from three
A.M.
to six
P.M
., the heat sapped him, his legs buckled, and he arrived home every night looking like he had been tossed in a bag of charcoal, thinking to himself, “I’m leaving my soul in these fields.”

Searching for the Holy Grail

Lexington, Kentucky

On New Year’s Day 2013, I steered a rental car through the snow-covered rolling hills just north of Lexington. The land there is divided into horse farms, and black four-board fencing provides simple and clear outlines to the pastures. As my car loped hypnotically past these farms and trees laden with mistletoe, I came to a lonely two-lane county road known as CR 1977. CR 1977 rises over small hills, curves, and then deflates as the hills bottom out. The road cuts past a farm to the north, home to a dozen studs, stallions, and broodmares. It passes the Masterson Equestrian facility, a large park for horses.

Then it bends and reveals a collection of stern, tall brick buildings set well back from the road. The compound could pass for a nineteenth-century factory were it not for the towering stadium lights that clarify the situation. The Federal Medical Center, as it’s now known, is home to seventeen hundred prison inmates.

I got out of my car. Prison officials had denied my request to see its innards. So 150 yards was as close as I was getting to one of the strangest monuments in the story of American opiate addiction. When it went up in 1935, this federal fortress was known as the Narcotic Farm. The Roosevelt administration deemed it a “New Deal for the Drug Addict.”

Under the Harrison Act of 1914, thousands of addicts were convicted as criminals and streamed into prisons, where their drug seeking disrupted life in the institutions. The government built the Narcotic Farm to house them.

It was a rare place—both a prison and a treatment center—that for forty years reflected the country’s schizophrenic approach to opiates and drug addiction. During years when much of the country was segregated, blacks and whites, gays and straights, Latinos, Italians, Irish, Chinese, men, and women from across America shared a thousand acres in Kentucky—with only heroin in common. Many were serving prison sentences; others, like beat writer William Burroughs, checked themselves in to kick the habit.

The Farm stressed outdoor work as addiction therapy. Inmates milked cows and raised tomatoes and wheat, and supplied the institution with food. There was a canning plant, a radio repair service, and a dental lab making false teeth. Administrators felt recreation was therapy. Addicts played basketball and tennis; the Farm had a golf course, a bowling alley, and basket-weaving classes.

In the 1940s, off in New York City, Charlie Parker turned swing jazz inside out. Hundreds of younger New York musicians worshipped the alto saxophonist and turned to heroin hoping to play more like Bird, who died addicted in 1955, his body and his art corroded by junk. Many of these musicians went to prison. A virtual generation of bebop’s young punks in dark glasses came to the Farm: Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, Howard McGhee, Elvin Jones, Chet Baker, Tadd Dameron, Jackie McLean, Sonny Stitt, and many more. They jammed for hours, formed bands that were never recorded, and played shows for the Farm’s inmates and Lexington hipsters who were allowed to attend. A Farm jazz band once played on
The
Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
.

I encountered the story of the Narcotic Farm as I sought to understand how, decades later, a Mexican village came to sell heroin across the country and in places where the drug had once been virtually unknown. The threads of these stories, I came to believe, ultimately connected.

For years the Farm was the world’s foremost center of addiction research, for reasons that predated the institution itself. World War I had again demonstrated to doctors the merciful painkilling benefits the morphine molecule provided. Fresh, too, in their memory were heroin’s first decades, which showed just as clearly that addiction too often bedeviled those who used opiates. Try as they might—with strategies as varied as farm work, group therapy, or prison—rehabilitation specialists never graduated much more than 10 percent of their addicts to true opiate freedom. The rest relapsed, slaves, it appeared, to the morphine molecule. This seemed a shame to scientists and physicians. Was mankind really doomed to not have it all? Couldn’t it have heaven without hell? Couldn’t the best scientists find a way of extracting the painkilling attributes from the molecule while discarding its miserable addictiveness?

In 1928, what would become known as the Committee on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) brought together the country’s best researchers to do just that. John D. Rockefeller Jr. organized it using money his father had set aside. The CPDD promoted cooperation among drug researchers in government, academia, and industry. German science used this kind of collaboration to come up with some of the world’s best drugs. But German drug supplies to America ceased during World War I. After the war, American scientists concluded that the country was vulnerable because U.S. drug research was random and haphazard.

The CPDD funded chemists and pharmacologists, academics and industrial scientists, toward the goal of finding a nonaddictive painkiller. Novocain, invented in 1905, avoided the need for addictive cocaine in dentistry. Why not a morphine substitute? Such a drug could cleanse doctors’ image as clueless dealers of dangerous drugs that they’d earned by widely prescribing heroin in the early 1900s. Academics, meanwhile, hoped for a new era of modern scientific research applied to medicinal drugs. Law enforcement hoped a nonaddictive pain reliever would lessen the fallout from its attempts to rid the country of opium.

Researchers called this drug the Holy Grail and the search for it would take the rest of the century and beyond.

The CPDD set up a laboratory at the University of Virginia to create these new drugs. Another lab formed at the University of Michigan, to test new drugs on animals. Now all that was needed was a place to test the new drugs on humans, a place where drug addicts were in ready and huge supply.

In 1935, the U.S. Narcotic Farm opened.

The Farm contained a section known as the Addiction Research Center (ARC). For decades, the ARC tested on inmates every major opiate that Committee-sponsored chemists produced: Dilaudid, Demerol, darvon, codeine, as well as Thorazine and many tranquilizers and sedatives. Experiments at the Farm showed that methadone lasted longer and spared junkies the severe highs and lows of heroin that spurred their frenzied attempts to score. Thus, they concluded, methadone could act as a replacement for heroin.

The ARC had a staff of psychiatrists, biochemists, physiologists, pharmacologists, lab technicians, and four guards. They studied every aspect of morphine’s interaction with man. ARC research developed the first quantitative scales for measuring degrees of addiction, severity of withdrawal, and the addictiveness of many drugs. For four decades, heroin and morphine addicts with long sentences would volunteer for studies because they were given dope. After the studies ended, the subjects were given a six-month rehabilitation to ensure they were no longer physically dependent.

As American science organized to search for the Holy Grail of a nonaddictive painkiller, the Farm made this research possible and kept hope alive. Researchers viewed their mission simply: to prevent another heroin; prevent another highly addictive drug unleashed on the country without proper study. With this, they justified experimentation on inmates. “The ARC saw itself as safeguarding public health on a global scale by preventing addictive compounds from destroying the lives of thousands,” wrote Nancy Campbell, J. P. Olsen, and Luke Walden in
The Narcotic Farm
, a fascinating book on the institution.

The research at Lexington generated hundreds of scholarly articles and amounted to the only serious study of addiction in the world at the time. The World Health Organization relied on it for data. Addiction study emerged there as a scientific field, and ARC staff were the first to conceive of addiction as not a character failing, or a crime, but rather a chronic brain disorder. The ARC was shut down in the 1970s, when the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee, investigating the Central Intelligence Agency, found that the ARC had done experiments with LSD on inmates at the behest of the CIA. With that, an era ended. The Farm was transformed into the prison and hospital that it is today.

But for forty years, all the drugs created in the CPDD’s search for the Holy Grail were tested on inmates at the Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky.

Early on, the UVA laboratory’s first director, Lyndon Small, synthesized a drug he called metopon. Metopon had some of morphine’s painkilling attributes but was slightly less addictive. Metopon fell short of the idea the CPDD pursued. Yet it was taken as proof that a morphine-like painkiller that was not addictive—that elusive Holy Grail—might be found someday.

This goal urged on the next generations of drug researchers, and in time helped fire a cadre of revolutionaries seeking a better way to treat pain in America.

The Pain

Through most of the twentieth century, doctors treating the terminally ill faced attitudes that seemed medieval when it came to opiates.

Docs who prescribed the painkillers were treated as virtual outlaws. Parsimony described how drugs were distributed. Several doctors’ signatures were often required even for small doses as dying people writhed in the most indecent pain. Treatments for pain came in strange concoctions. One was called the Brompton cocktail—a combo named for the English hospital where it was used: morphine, cocaine, Thorazine, honey, gin, and water—which read to me like a concoction some street junkie would come up with, but which I’m told was pretty effective.

In the 1970s, attitudes slowly began changing. In England, Cicely Saunders, a nurse and researcher, opened a hospice that treated terminal cancer patients with opiates. Under Saunders, St. Christopher’s Hospice in London was the world’s first to combine care for the dying with research and clinical trials. St. Christopher’s was inspired by the idea that patients should be treated for pain without the drugs also destroying their personalities. Saunders’s employee, Robert Twycross, began experiments that showed enormous benefits from using opiates on dying cancer patients. St. Christopher’s promoted opiates, sometimes at high doses, to relieve the pain of the dying. Saunders and Twycross believed it inhumane to do otherwise. If people were soon to die, what did it matter if they were addicted? Wasn’t pain relief and a dignified death more important? At St. Christopher’s, dying patients were given opiates regularly, whether they were in pain or not.