Dreamland (45 page)

Instead, Sandoval trolls south Denver strip mall parking lots searching for telltale signs of deals about to happen: Frantic white kids in cars backed into parking spaces, their heads swiveling, surveying all that moves. He watches until the Xalisco runner passes, then follows both cars, calling for backup to arrest them down some side street when the deal goes down.

“I find myself some days traveling all over the district looking,” he said.

Doing that, Sandoval made huge numbers of cases. His method is low cost and high volume—the law-enforcement version of the Xalisco heroin system. True, he was arresting the drug world’s equivalent of day laborers. They had only small amounts of heroin. They kept quiet, were deported, and were replaced within a couple days. But Sandoval’s approach recognized that Xalisco cell owners were small businessmen. They were sensitive to cost, like every small businessman. They weren’t
Scarface
-style kingpins, spending wantonly and living for today. Some cell leaders required their drivers to turn in receipts at the end of the day. They had to account for every dollar.

So the way Sandoval saw it, each bust forced a crew chief in Nayarit to buy another car in Denver, find another apartment, and send another driver across the border. Each was a headache for a businessman who already had to make sure that his runners—eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old males most of them—didn’t run out of supply, didn’t party, didn’t get anyone pregnant, didn’t use the product they were selling. With each cell phone Sandoval confiscated, the crew chief had to reconstitute his client list, though soon the cells began keeping master lists of clients’ phone numbers—on a computer somewhere in Nayarit, Sandoval figured.

“The more drivers we take off, the more desperate they get for drivers,” he said as we circled a southeast Denver strip mall.

Amid an epidemic, this was about as good as the cops in District 3 could do. New addicts graduated from OxyContin to heroin every day and dope demand raged across Denver. Drawing from deep labor pools in Mexico, the Xalisco Boys’ system appeared impervious. Sandoval’s busts were as cost-effective as any other strategy. Denver’s District 3 narcs took heart, therefore, from small victories. A couple weeks before I showed up, one Xalisco cell owner, angered that several drivers had been arrested, sent up a guy to act as a consultant, of a sort. The consultant’s job was to accompany the drivers on their routes, study how they worked, and suggest ways they might avoid arrest.

Officers arrested him, too.

A Parent's Soul Pain

Ohio

A
s I tried to chart the spread of the opiate epidemic, one thing dawned on me: Other than addicts and traffickers, most of the people I was speaking to were government workers.

They were the only ones I saw fighting this scourge. We've seen a demonization of government and the exaltation of the free market in America over the previous thirty years. But here was a story where the battle against the free market's worst effects was taken on mostly by anonymous public employees. These were local cops like Dennis Chavez and Jes Sandoval, prosecutors like Kathleen Bickers, federal agents like Jim Kuykendall and Rock Stone, coroners like Terry Johnson, public nurses like Lisa Roberts, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control, judges like Seth Norman, state pharmacists like Jaymie Mai, and epidemiologists like Jennifer Sabel and Ed Socie.

I saw, too, that they were hamstrung. Sandoval and Bickers and Norman were limited in what they could accomplish as long as people remained silent and scary quantities of pills sloshed around America, carrying people to heroin.

So, in time, my focus shifted to the families of those who died, people who were standing up to warn others. Such advocates were few. Most grieving families retreated in shame and never said a public word about how a son died in a halfway house with a needle in his arm. A decade in, with sixteen thousand fatal opiate overdoses a year, only a handful of parent groups had formed to do anything about this public health crisis.

The marketing forces arrayed against these parents made their crusade quixotic. Their lone qualification for the task was a soul pain as relentless as the physical pain that opiates were now commonly prescribed to calm. But no one else was doing the job, and crying days away, arms around a photo album, seemed a waste.

One of them was Jo Anna Krohn, a woman with the soft Southern drawl so common down in Portsmouth, Ohio.

 

On my first glance at Portsmouth, Ohio, I found it hard to see much cause for hope. So many buildings were abandoned. So many folks looked dazed. So many others were on dispiriting disability. The town seemed infected with a pessimism and inertia that I associated with depressed Mexican villages—places that those with aspirations left.

I'm glad I kept going back. For in time, beneath that worn-out veneer, Portsmouth revealed another side. The opiate epidemic pushed the town to unimaginable depths. But the town where the pill mill was invented, where an OxyContin/Walmart economy had taken root, a town savaged by economics for thirty years—that led the country into the opiate epidemic and that was flat on its back and forgotten—refused to stay down.

I love a good underdog story. This one seemed exhilaratingly American. As I tracked signs of how the opiate epidemic had changed the country, one place I found myself returning to—a half-dozen times or so—was Portsmouth, Ohio.

And there I met Jo Anna.

Several years before, on April 22, 2008, Jo Anna sat next to the hospital bed that was the end of what seemed to her such a fast road down. In the bed, tubes extruding from his body, lay Wesley, her comatose eighteen-year-old son.

A mother of five and a substitute teacher, Jo Anna prayed with her childhood friend, Karrie, by her side. The two women had grown up on neighboring farms outside Portsmouth.

Snatches of Wes's life appeared before Jo Anna as she cried and prayed some more. Living with his father, Wes began smoking pot at thirteen, and at fourteen dove into the pills that were everywhere in Portsmouth. He was a football player and handsome. He was a linebacker and a ferocious hitter, and thus popular. So a lot of what he did was forgiven and he got used to that. Football players were common among the new rural opiate addicts. Some got addicted to pills prescribed for injuries. Others, like Wes, took them at parties.

By his senior year in 2008, as he starred on the field for Portsmouth High School, Wes had a minor criminal record. He dealt Oxys from his father's house. He bought a gun for protection. One night five weeks before graduation, he was high and partying in his father's basement with younger kids. As a lark, Wes put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He lingered on life support for thirty-six hours. Eight hundred people attended his funeral. The family played “Angel,” by singer Sarah McLachlan. His death was on the
Daily Times
front page four days running. Five of his organs were donated.

Wes wasn't the first Portsmouth kid to die. McLachlan's song, written about a junkie whose life slips away in a “dark, cold hotel,” was becoming a standard at youth funerals, the soundtrack to Portsmouth's swelling opiate epidemic. But ashamed families shrouded their children's passings in a fog of euphemism and palatable lies. One couple Jo Anna knew claimed their son died of a heart attack, when everyone knew his drug use caused the heart attack. Coming on top of everything else that had happened to Portsmouth, this truth was just too painful. As in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the newspaper was careful not to reveal too much about these deaths.

Wes's death was like that at first. He died of a gunshot. The newspaper never said he was high on OxyContin, had been using off and on for years, sold pills, that his house had been broken into twice, and he bought the gun from a convicted felon for protection from robbers.

That was the full story and the one that Jo Anna Krohn, sitting at her son's side, decided she would tell.

“I was going to be honest,” she said when I met her a few years later. “I wasn't going to try to hide what had happened. If I said it enough, maybe another family would never be in my place.”

A year after Wes's death, a high school invited her to speak. She told the kids the full story. Another high school invited her. She brought photos of Wes to a town meeting, showed them around, and told what there was to tell.

Kids were dying everywhere in Portsmouth. Soon grieving mothers gathered around her. It was like they were waiting for somebody else to start talking. They put photographs of their dead children on an abandoned building downtown. That finally put faces to the town's unspoken curse. Families of dead kids found the freedom to talk publicly.

It took a decade. But the first voice raised by a parent was that of Jo Anna Krohn as she toured high schools in 2009, telling kids why Wes died. She formed SOLACE, a group for parents mourning the loss of children to opiates. SOLACE became the first parent antidrug organization to grow from the opiate epidemic's ground zero.

When Jo Anna and some mothers appeared at an attorney general's press conference in green SOLACE T-shirts, the media took notice. Jo Anna began getting phone calls from other counties. She realized then that kids were dying all over Ohio. Nobody had been talking about it. Jo Anna stopped substitute teaching. SOLACE was all she did. Chapters of SOLACE formed in sixteen counties. She spoke in Brown and Knox counties, up in Chillicothe, in Ironton—everywhere except for the high school Wes attended and that now offered a scholarship in his name. Portsmouth High never got around to inviting her.

She grew overwhelmed one day, waiting to give a speech with her friend Karrie. They had grown up doing chores and swimming at the local pond and, as teens, sneaking a beer now and then. They double-dated, imagining how they'd marry and raise kids.

Now in their fifties, each woman had a son dead from dope-related gunshots; Karrie's son, Kent, was murdered in 2000. Each woman also had another son strung out. Jo Anna's oldest lived in a trailer without running water. Karrie's second son had been to prison three times, and she had PTSD from thirteen years of dealing with her two sons' addictions. The women had once found Karrie's son in a KFC bathroom shooting up.

What had become of their girlhood American Dreams? Jo Anna wondered.

“We used to catch snakes in the creek,” she told her friend. “Who would've ever thought that we'd be here together?”

 

I sought out Jo Anna Krohn because I couldn't remember any drug scourge so ably abetted by silence.

Cocaine in the early 1980s came with Colombians who shot up Miami strip malls, levitating the murder rate and inflaming the public. My first week as a crime reporter in Stockton, California, in 1989, I walked a street lined by two-dozen crack dealers. When I opened the front gate to a dilapidated house, the crackheads fled like roaches. Bloods and Crips came and warred across Stockton. One of their drive-by shootings paralyzed a toddler. I often wonder what became of her. She would be in her midtwenties by now.

Next came methamphetamine, made in labs that exploded. Meth left users scabbed and twitching.

None of that blight, violence, and outrage accompanied the morphine molecule as it swept the United States. As opiates quietly killed unprecedented numbers of kids, it was as if the morphine molecule narcotized public ire as well. That it began in voiceless parts of the country—in Appalachia and rural America—helped keep it quiet at first. To even see the plague required examining confusing and incomplete data. A generation of coroners had grown up unused to reporting on drug overdoses. The nuances of whether someone died from opiates, and if so, whether that was oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, or heroin were sometimes lost.

The signature location of this drug scourge, meanwhile, was not the teeming, public crack houses. It was, instead, kids' private suburban bedrooms and cars—the products of American prosperity. The bedroom was the addict's sanctuary, the shrine to the self-involvement dope provokes. It was their own little dreamland, though quite the opposite of Portsmouth's legendary community pool, where kids grew up in public and under a hundred watchful eyes. Each suburban middle-class kid had a private bedroom and the new addicts retreated to them to dope up and die.

“We lived in our bedroom,” said one woman in recovery. “You could have a big, huge house, but you could lock that door, isolated. Everybody I ever got high with, it was always in their bedroom. It was privacy. Don't come knock on my bedroom door.”

Most kids also had cars and, when combined with pills or heroin, those vehicles were as destructive as those bedrooms. Their doting parents gave them these cars, which were necessary to navigate pedestrian-proof suburbs. But addicted kids also used them to meet their dealers. Without legions of middle-class kids with cars, the Xalisco Boys' business model didn't work. In cars, kids shot up, gave rides to fellow junkies, hid their dope. When their parents' trust in them finally died, the kids lived in these cars, and the cars became their private bedrooms.

As heroin and OxyContin addiction consumed the children of America's white middle classes, parents hid the truth and fought the scourge alone. They kept quiet. Friends and neighbors who knew shunned them. “When your kid's dying from a brain tumor or leukemia, the whole community shows up,” said the mother of two addicts. “They bring casseroles. They pray for you. They send you cards. When your kid's on heroin, you don't hear from anybody, until they die. Then everybody comes and they don't know what to say.”