Dreamland (35 page)

Walmart also regulated prices in the OxyContin economy. Shoplifters got half the value in pills of the price tag on the item. If there was no price listed on say, a Black and Decker circular saw an addict was offering, Keith Henson said, “You’d call Walmart and do a price check. ‘I’m looking for this [Black and Decker] circular saw. How much do them run?’ They’d tell you. ‘It’s sixty-nine ninety-nine.’” Keith would pay roughly half that in pills—usually an oxycodone 30—for that circular saw the addict was offering.

Of course, prices were subject to a junkie’s desperation. This was pitiless commerce. Mary Ann once offered a junkie an oxycodone 15 for a pair of stolen Nike Jordan basketball shoes because the guy was too dope sick to go find another buyer. She bought a refrigerator from a family with children for three 30s. But generally, if a shoplifter stole a bag of diapers, Tide detergent, DVDs, and a power sander, worth about two hundred dollars at Walmart, he had a reasonable expectation that a dealer in town would pay him half the value in pills: an OxyContin 80 and an oxycodone 20.

It helped that Walmart employees displayed little love for the store and its famously low wages. Some workers were strung out themselves. Some greeters were too old to recognize what was happening. Either way, a lot of Walmart workers had no hankering for a junkie face-off.

“They’re making ten dollars an hour,” said a veteran booster I met in Portsmouth. “They can see the look in our faces, ‘Don’t get in our way.’ Every now and then you find one with a cape. One who’s trying to get that manager position. The tough guy’s going to try. But when I’m in withdrawal, I’m tougher.”

The opiate scourge might never have spread as quickly had these rural areas where it all started possessed a diversity of small retailers, whose owners had invested their lives in their stores, knew the addicts personally, and stood ready to defend against them.

Walmart allowed junkie shoplifters to play Santa to the pill economy, filling dealers’ orders for toys and presents in exchange for dope. Angie Thuma supplied a half dozen dealers with all their Christmas presents for several years running, and gifts for her kids as well. (As it happened, Christmas Day was big for dealers, who opened for business awaiting junkies wanting to exchange for pills the gifts they—or their children—received.) “For a couple months before each Christmas, I couldn’t steal enough,” Thuma said. “Even if I went several times a day, I didn’t have enough arms to get everything they wanted.”

It was not only drug dealers who bought the lifted merchandise. Many in the town’s depressed, minimum wage economy were avid for a deal and didn’t care too much where it came from. Some of Angie Thuma’s best clients were middle-aged women raising their grandkids, who couldn’t get by on the salaries they earned.

But by and large, it was dealers who fueled the shoplifting trade and prodded the boosters to new ingenuity. As dealers prepared their kids to return to school in August, shoplifters fanned out armed with long order lists of clothes with kids’ sizes in shoes, shirts and pants, and school supplies. One kid I talked to wheeled flat-screen TVs through a Walmart tire shop, which rarely had much supervision, and had a door with no alarm. Line a purse with aluminum foil and the sensors of any merchandise you put in it wouldn’t activate the alarms as you exited Walmart.

Thuma drove other boosters to Walmart, who’d go in the store and find a large box containing a child’s outdoor plastic slide. They wheeled it to a secluded area of the store and emptied it. Then they would tour the store filling the now-empty box with DVD players, Xbox consoles, headphones, Tide detergent pods. They would pay the twenty dollars that the slide cost, and wheel the box to the exit. When the alarm invariably went off, they would show the elderly greeter the receipt and be waved out. Some electronic malfunction, no doubt, honey.

Another veteran Wal-Mart booster told me he would wear very baggy clothing, with long-john underwear underneath, taped at the ankles. He’d walk through the store stuffing merchandise in his long johns, which would balloon out, though nothing would show under his baggy pants and shirt. “I walked out of there, it looked like I was four hundred pounds,” he said.

People in Portsmouth opened stores in their apartments, specializing in certain products, most of which they stole from Walmart: garden supplies, tools, automotive equipment. One recovering addict told me he visited the apartment of a woman who stocked everything a baby needed. “She had a bedroom you could go into set up like a store, diapers in one corner, baby food and formula, clothes on a dresser like a display table,” he said. “Then she’d have boxes of high chairs and strollers. She would go into Walmart to steal shit; or she’d have people go in there with orders and they’d deliver it to her.”

Walmart, for a long time, did not require a receipt for returned goods. Anything stolen could be returned for a gift card for the full value of the merchandise. Dealers bought those cards for half their value in pills. A five-hundred-dollar Walmart card was worth three OxyContin 80s—for which the dealer had paid a few dollars with the Medicaid card scam. A vast trade in Walmart cards kept Portsmouth’s army of pill dealers in household necessities.

A Walmart receipt, meanwhile, could get you cash. Junkies scoured Walmart parking lots for discarded receipts. They’d steal the items on a receipt, flashing the paper at the greeter as they left. Then they’d return the merchandise, with the receipt, and exchange it for cash.

Amid this madness, the sons and daughters of Portsmouth’s business owners, the children of sheriff’s captains and doctors and lawyers, saw a future in OxyContin. Some regarded pills as a grassroots response to economic catastrophe—the way some poor Mexican villagers view drug trafficking. Dealers who could not have found a legitimate job in moribund Portsmouth bartered pills to support themselves and feed their kids. Some remodeled dilapidated houses. Others bought cars or trucks.

“When six months ago there were kids going to school with shoes falling off their feet, and now they have new shoes, we feel that’s an accomplishment,” Mary Ann said. “Our parents had all this opportunity. Portsmouth was a booming place then, [with] a bus system and trolley and jobs that lasted. We were raised with a sense of pride for our town. But when we get out into the real world there’s nothing to be proud of. We can’t help our town. So when we found a way to help our town, we did—which in turn backfired on everyone, of course.”

Down in Xalisco, Nayarit, black tar heroin lifted sugarcane farmers to the status of local merchants. In Portsmouth, middle-class pill addicts made choices that plunged them into the underclass. They ended their education with high school. They had kids too young and weren’t married when they did. Before long, they were pocked and penniless on the street.

But as a generation of kids wasted away in postindustrial Portsmouth, their parents were unable to
not
give them gas money to get to some new job that never existed. They couldn’t bring themselves to
not
pay their bail or electric bill.

When some of these kids died, mortified parents told neighbors that their son had a heart attack, or their daughter had died from injuries sustained in a car accident.

It took a full decade before a Portsmouth mother was able to reject pretense and be the first in the state to say publicly that dope killed her son.

A Criminal Case

Southern Virginia

In August 2001, about the time Jaymie Mai was discovering how many injured Washington workers were dying from painkiller overdoses, and reports of widespread OxyContin abuse were circulating through Appalachia, John Brownlee took the job of U.S. attorney for the western district of Virginia.

The office is a small one, with only twenty-four attorneys. But it was located near the gathering opiate storm.

Brownlee had a sterling Republican Party pedigree. His father had once been secretary of the army. Brownlee was in the army reserve and continued to perform his reservist service while U.S. attorney. He was being mentioned as a possible future governor of Virginia, or a state attorney general.

Years later, after all that transpired, when Brownlee was in private practice and those possibilities were no longer being discussed, I spoke with him at some length by telephone.

During his years as U.S. attorney, he said, people were dying of overdoses across the states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and southern Virginia. Other prosecutors’ offices were indicting notorious pill mill doctors, David Procter among them. Brownlee’s office jumped into the fray with the controversial prosecution of a Roanoke doctor named Cecil Knox, who state records showed was a prolific prescriber of OxyContin.

From there, Brownlee said, he decided to take a broader view of what was going on.

“We looked at this and said we should take a look at the company marketing this stuff,” he said. He subpoenaed all Purdue’s records related to marketing OxyContin. The records numbered in the millions of pages and e-mails. Federal employees took up residence in a conference room on a floor of Purdue headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, and copied company files for months.

Brownlee said the records showed how the company was training salespeople to sell OxyContin as if it were nonaddictive and did not provoke withdrawal symptoms. Physicians, therefore, could feel comfortable prescribing it for many kinds of pain.

“One of the pieces of evidence that was looked at were ‘call notes.’ The company had a process in which salesmen would go to a doctor, then summarize what was discussed. That went back to a central clearinghouse. Once we were able to see those, we began to see a pattern of conduct. Is this a few rogue guys or is this more of a corporate policy? It became clear that this was more than a few rogue [salesmen]. They were trained to sell the drug in a way that was simply not accurate. That was some of the best evidence of misbranding.

“It was an extremely high percentage of sales reps in various states who were making these allegations. This was done in all fifty states. That’s when you rise to corporate culpability.”

By the fall of 2006, John Brownlee was prepared to file a case of criminal misbranding against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin.

“Took Over the OxyContin Belt”

Columbus, Ohio

Forget you have children.

This advice was given to Mario, an illegal immigrant, by his new boss from Xalisco, Nayarit. Mario was preparing for what turned out to be a short career as a dispatcher for a black tar heroin cell in Columbus, Ohio, a few years after the Man brought the drug there.

“Forget that people may do to your kids what you're doing to the children of others,” his new boss told him in a restaurant one day. “Otherwise you won't sleep.

“And,” he added, “don't let the clients die. Care for them. They're giving you money.”

Mario had worked for several years as a mechanic in Portland, Oregon. Many of his clients then were heroin runners in Portland from Xalisco, Nayarit, or villages nearby. He sold them two or three cars a week. They offered him work in their networks, which he declined at first. Then a series of financial problems made him reconsider. So one summer he accepted a job with the Xalisco man he called his “boss” and they drove to Columbus.

“I spoke some English. I was clean. I had ID, good credit to rent an apartment. I rented one there; they paid the rent,” he told me.

He earned five hundred dollars a week as a dispatcher, taking telephone orders from a roster of users. The network's sales grew to more than two thousand dollars a day. His boss returned to Nayarit, and waited for workers like Mario to send the money home. Mario woke in his bare apartment each morning, took phone calls all day, directed the drivers, but rarely socialized with them. He hated needles, but he lived far from the effects of what he was selling.

“I never saw anyone inject himself,” he said. “I never saw people get sick from lack of dope. I never knew how people got sick. I never knew anything of the people who died. Had I known, I'd have left it.”

The drugs arrived regularly from Nayarit. It did not come in truckloads, as he imagined it would, like on those television shows. Rather, it came with couriers carrying a kilo or two at a time. Ant-like, he thought. His boss shipped it from Nayarit to Pomona, California, where it was cut up and sent in smaller quantities to Columbus and other cities. The boss hired workers from Xalisquillo whose families he knew, so he knew the network would send its profits back to him every month. His boss himself had once worked as a runner in another network before going out on his own. He knew all the dealers and drivers in Columbus. Mario made trips with his boss to Nashville and Charlotte to arrange supply deals with other networks.

He dispatched drivers around Columbus for four months until the day the police barged in and he went to prison.

“Nayarit doesn't have a cartel,” he said. “It's people acting as individuals who are doing it on their own: micro-entrepreneurs. They're always looking for where there's more money, places where there's no competition. There are thousands of small networks. Anyone can be boss of a network.”

 

Because of that, the Xalisco Boys had succeeded by the mid-2000s in avoiding virtually every town Americans traditionally associate with heroin. No Xalisco Boy ventured to Baltimore or Philadelphia or Detroit. No Nayarit sugarcane farm boy was going to shoot it out with armed heroin gangs in New York City. They didn't have to. Midsize metro areas had legions of new young customers and no worrisome gangs or mafias. The Xalisco Boys' ranchero farmboy roots and unbeatable retail system led them to areas of least resistance, now tenderized to heroin by the widespread prescribing of legal opiate painkillers.