Dreamland (52 page)

As I followed this story, I took as given that kicking opiate addiction required a dozen attempts at rehabilitation. The figure I kept hearing was one in ten—the number of people who succeeded in each rehab. That was true, Whitney said, only because so few people get the full treatment they need. Too often they go in for three weeks or six weeks. Brain chemistry needs far more time to recover from the blast it takes from opiates.

“We have as good or better treatment results as they do for asthma or congestive heart failure—if we have the tools to work with,” he said. “But people do not get enough treatment to get well. It’s as if we said you only get half the chemotherapy you need to treat your cancer. People wouldn’t stand for that. Insurance companies don’t want to [fund] addiction treatment with enough duration and intensity because we as a society do not demand it.”

Central Ohio was ground
zero
in the opiate scourge and that had given folks a lot to think about.

For Paul Schoonover, the best hour of the month was the time he spent sharing his son’s story with kids at the rehab center that Matt left the day before he died.

Paul was also working with the nascent college recovery movement at Ohio State. The movement began years ago in response to alcohol and pot abuse on college campuses. Rutgers, Brown, and Texas Tech pioneered the movement’s hallmarks: dorms free of drugs and alcohol, 12-step meetings, counseling, drug-free social events, full scholarships for recovering addicts, majors in addiction therapy. But the movement gained huge momentum and spread to many more schools with the opiate scourge, and Ohio State was part of it.

“It’s been white middle- and upper-class kids,” a young woman at Ohio State named Sarah Nerad told me. “Their parents are the ones who are going to the schools saying, ‘What are you doing for my kid?’ It really gets the attention of parents and schools when you have kids heavily addicted to opiates and heroin.”

Nerad, a recovering heroin addict from the Houston suburbs, was getting a master’s degree at Ohio State University and had a grant to help start the movement on campus.

The roster of universities with new recovery movements sounded like the top college football rankings, and reflected how dope addiction had swept red states: the Crimson Tide of Alabama and the Bulldogs of Georgia, Ole Miss and Southern Mississippi, Baylor, Texas, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Virginia—as well as Oregon, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State, and several smaller schools—all had campus recovery movements in response, largely, to pill and heroin abuse. Ohio State had opened a twenty-eight-room recovery dorm.

Meanwhile, apart from expanding Medicaid, Governor Kasich had begun a program called Start Talking! that was intended to bring the opiate epidemic into the public conversation. Attorney General Mike DeWine had a heroin initiative, a main goal of which was to connect disparate groups in Ohio towns and get them working together.

These measures recognized a recurring theme: the most selfish drug fed on atomized communities. Isolation was now as endemic to wealthy suburbs as to the Rust Belt, and had been building for years. It was true about much of a country where the streets were barren on summer evenings and kids no longer played Kick the Can as parents watched from porches. That dreamland had been lost and replaced, all too often, finally, by empty streets of bigger, nicer houses hiding addiction that each family kept secret.

Chronic pain was probably best treated not by one pill but holistically. In the same way, the antidote to heroin wasn’t so much naloxone; it was community. Paul Schoonover felt that.

So when he wasn’t speaking to kids at the rehab center, Paul spent his time connecting groups of parents, nonprofits, and schools—and talking about Matt.

“Nobody can do it on their own,” he said. “But no drug dealer, nor cartel, can stand against families, schools, churches, and communities united together.”

PART V

Up from the Rubble

Portsmouth, Ohio

In 2012, a lanky, hollow-eyed white man arrived in Portsmouth, Ohio, his arms purple and scraped with needle marks, a third of his teeth gone, and half his life wasted. He carried with him ten bucks, a couple Percocets, and a few sheets of scrawled poetry.

The addict Jeremy Wilder was escaping rural America. He was thirty-five. His entire adult life had coincided with the opiate epidemic and the decline of small towns like his own. Years before, OxyContin spilled over his town of Aberdeen downriver in Brown County. He spent the best years of his youth in quacks’ clinics and selling more pills than he could count. He bought heroin in Cincinnati from those Mexicans and their delivery business. He had two kids, but didn’t know what it was like to raise a child sober. He’d gone to prison and returned to Aberdeen.

Aberdeen looked to be the salt of America’s earth. Lots of farmland. Barns. Families growing corn and kids. The kind of place where the country songs say boys liked to drink a beer and raise a little hell on Saturday night, but made sure to give thanks to the Man upstairs on Sunday. But it had been quite a while since Jeremy had seen that kind of town. The Aberdeen he knew was a sewer of pills and needles, which was why little old Brown County had the highest rate of drug overdoses in Ohio. Jeremy could name a dozen towns like it along the mighty Ohio River, once a vital vein in the country’s industrial arm, now contaminated with heroin.

He called a childhood friend living in Portsmouth. The friend was also an addict, but Wilder didn’t know what else to do. Portsmouth was far from Brown County. The guy said he didn’t have much, just a couch in a small apartment, but Wilder was welcome to it. Jeremy left his cell phone in Aberdeen—every contact in it was an addict or a dealer. His father drove him to Portsmouth and gave him a little cash and those Percocets to tide him over.

“Good luck,” his father said, and drove off.

Jeremy watched him go. He was alone and hoping to get clean in the pill mecca of America.

His poetry was among the few accomplishments in which Jeremy took pride. He never liked to write as a kid. But in 2003, locked up and bored in Brown County jail, he began scrawling. Mostly he wrote verses about the addict life and poems for guys in prison to send to their girlfriends. A lot of it was bad. But some of it, he felt, had value. Through a couple prison stints, he began to write every day in his cell. When you wrote, inmates avoided you and conflicts went by you like water around a rock.

Will I wake up from this nod or will this be the end?

Will it be just like the day when I buried my best friend?

Would I be truly missed by my family and my wife?

Sometimes I really wish I’d lived a different life . . .

I walked up to the casket so I can truly see.

I take a moment to stare inside, but I was staring down at me.

He never wrote when he was using. He thought only of his next hit when he was using. Heroin numbed not just the body but also the emotions. Writing was the opposite of dope. So he turned to it when he was sober, as a way of staying so. He was surprised that it helped.

It surprised Jeremy just as much that he had turned to Portsmouth for the redemption he figured he didn’t deserve. He knew the town once had jobs, now had none, and instead teemed with dope fiends. The docs who prescribed his pills learned the trade in Portsmouth. But with no other hope, he hugged Portsmouth like a life raft.

As it happened, the curious fact was that as the addict Jeremy Wilder sought rebirth in this beat-down town, he was not alone.

If Portsmouth had a survivor from its industrial glory days, it was a shoelace company called Mitchellace.

Mitchellace was founded in 1902 to supply the many shoe factories in Portsmouth. Charles Mitchell invented a shoestring braiding machine—bobbins pivoting and weaving like the Harlem Globetrotters—and once had twelve hundred of them running full-time as the company’s five thousand employees made 120,000 pairs of shoestrings a day. Back then, Mitchellace was the country’s largest shoelace manufacturer.

Making, packaging, and exporting shoelaces to the United States was apparently something few foreign companies could do profitably. Effervescent management under Kerry Keating, the husband of the great-granddaughter of the man who took over the company from Mitchell, kept the company expanding even as Portsmouth’s shoe companies died. The company moved into a hulking eight-story building that had once housed the Williams Shoes factory.

Keating retired and his three sons took over. Around town, the Keating boys were known as “third-generation.” In Portsmouth, and probably in most of America’s Rust Belt, that was shorthand: the first generation built their companies; the second, with business degrees, managed and expanded them; but the third generation was raised with an appetite for leisure and their companies often declined. A lot of folks around Portsmouth had seen far too much third generation.

The Keating boys made the decisions but they weren’t often on the premises. Kerry Keating had opened a shoelace plant in Honduras to satisfy demands from Kiwi, a shoe-products firm, for lower prices. The Keating sons began moving production for other companies there as well—companies that hadn’t been so adamant about cost reductions.

Bryan Davis had started as a kid at Mitchellace, working the lowest jobs and rising through the years to become vice president of sales.

“We could still do it twice as fast here, with half the people, as they could abroad,” he said. “But they shut down the braiding and weaving operation here that had been in their family since 1902. They shut it down and were doing it overseas.”

Portsmouth workers trained to make shoelaces were let go. By 2009, the company employed eighty people. The Keatings bought a California shoe-supply company. Paying that debt, Mitchellace couldn’t pay for the yarn and wax needed to make what it sold.

“We had orders coming out our ears,” Davis said. “We just didn’t have the money to fill them.”

Customers abandoned the company. Finally, a bank called in its note on Mitchellace. The company’s employees were furloughed. The company that had invented the shoelace industry, and survived foreign competition, now faced bankruptcy.

Most around town accepted the company’s fate. Years of defeat convinced folks of the ideas propounded by business schools and Wall Street: Outsourcing was inevitable; growth came from sexy acquisitions and not from expanding a business’s abilities to win new customers. This dogma judged towns like Portsmouth as unredeemable as a street junkie. The town itself, as enslaved to this way of thinking as the heroin addict is to the drug that destroys him, seemed to believe that it wasn’t worth saving.

“You can only be knocked down so many times,” Davis said, “until you start buying into the idea ‘Oh, well, it’s over. We lost.’”

And so it was that in 2009, with a pill plague consuming its children, and the news that its last shoe-industry factory was about to close, Portsmouth, Ohio, found itself at rock bottom.

But any addict knows that rock bottom is where recovery begins. That’s what happened with Mitchellace. Then it happened in Portsmouth, too.

Nelson Smith was at a bank a few days later when he heard about the company’s bankruptcy. Smith owns a construction company in Portsmouth, and knows nothing about shoelaces. But Bryan Davis did, so Smith called him.

“This isn’t going to happen,” Smith said. “We’re going to save these jobs. We’re going to save this industry in Portsmouth. Are you on board?”

“Well,” Davis said, “I don’t have a whole lot else going on.”

Smith assembled a group of local businessmen who put up their own money to keep the plant afloat: a lawyer, an insurance agent, a financial planner, Davis, and Ryan Bouts, Mitchellace’s vice president of manufacturing. The team wrote a forty-page business plan called Project Goliath, and named their proposed company Sole Choice. Also in the bidding for the remains of Mitchellace were the Kiwi shoe company and an equity firm the Keatings now partnered with.

Two weeks later, the parties went to court to decide the future of shoelace manufacturing in Ohio. All the creditors were there. The judge began calling the former owners “the Keating Four,” then awarded the company to Smith, Davis, and their Sole Choice investors.

I met Bryan Davis a couple years later. We walked the hulking plant and talked over the roar of the bobbins that spun out long streams of laces to be used for boots, medical supplies, tennis shoes, lanyards, and Oxfords.

“It took individuals to say, ‘No more,’” Davis said. “‘We’re not going to lose any more jobs and we’re not going to lose another industry in this town.’ We were the last bastion of what was a great shoe industry: shoelace manufacture. And we were going to let it go.”

Three floors of the plant were empty. Davis took that to mean there was room to grow. By the time I visited, Davis said, Sole Choice had three hundred customers—up from twenty-four. Forty people had their jobs back and more were coming on. The company exported shoelaces to thirty countries, including China and Taiwan.

“The outsourcing mentality has cost us millions and millions of jobs. We have now done that for thirty-some years and we have literally destroyed our manufacturing base in this country. It’s all been about money, the mighty dollar. The true entrepreneurial spirit of the U.S. has to be about more than that. It has to be about people, relationships, about building communities. Money—that comes. You’ll get that eventually, but happiness comes from these other things.”