Dreamland (54 page)

“7-4-0 reminds me of my hometown, Elkhart, Indiana (574),” one woman commented after reading several blog posts I wrote on the song.

By my last visit, it was clear that Portsmouth was starting over, throwing off old dogmas and a dependence culture. The town seemed now to hold itself a bit more accountable, looking to recover shredded community and take control of its future.

The most remarkable sign of this by far was that slowly, but without a doubt, hundreds of addicts were turning away from dope and tending to their own recovery. Close to 10 percent of the town was in recovery. The town that led the country into the opiate epidemic, ground zero in the pill explosion, was now poised to lead out of it as well.

With the quacks and the clinics gone, townspeople found that their children, now clean, began wandering home. They’d been gone a long time, and many never returned.

Hard-held attitudes in conservative Scioto County softened. Recovering addicts now had an easier time finding work. Everyone had friends or family on dope. Some employers believed in second chances. Others saw little choice. Those who were in recovery were at least going to pass a drug test. A job wasn’t a panacea and many people relapsed even after finding work. But it was a start.

Getting clean awoke a creativity and imagination in those who made it back. At times it felt as if a new workforce had moved in. Addicts in recovery were injecting Portsmouth with what other American cities relied on Mexican immigrants to provide: energy, optimism, gratitude for an opportunity.

Portsmouth’s resurrection, like that RWR video, was sprouting from the rubble of the town’s decline. The town was positioned to be a national center for addiction research and treatment. It had thousands of addicts—both active and recovering—and lots of vacant buildings to expand into. Not since the Narcotic Farm closed in Lexington, Kentucky, in the 1970s did the country have an opportunity for the study of so many addicts in so small a place.

“The steel mill towns got ate up,” Lisa Roberts told me one day at lunch. “To replace our industrial base we got prisons and nuclear plants. Then heroin became the new industry. This was allowed to percolate in Appalachia for at least a decade. What happened then is it moved out like a cancer across the country. Now we’re being looked at as leaders because we have the experience and we know how this works.”

Indeed, Scioto County was ahead of the country in a lot. As fatal overdoses set records in the state and the nation, they fell in Scioto County. The county had a needle exchange program that took in a hundred thousand syringes a year; new hepatitis C cases dropped by half. Addicts saved twenty-three people overdosing by injecting naloxone they were given through a state-funded pilot project in Scioto County.

China, having lost two Opium Wars waged on it by the British Empire, cured itself of its opium addiction by relying on former addicts to mentor their dope-sick brothers and sisters. Portsmouth was doing the same. Twelve-step meetings were all over town, sometimes several a day. Addicts saw examples all around them of people getting clean and happy. A newly recovering addict now had mentors to call at three
A.M
. who knew how hard things could get. Many recovering addicts had applied to Shawnee State, hoping to become social workers or drug counselors. The school was adding professors and a bachelor’s of social work, and a psychology master’s degree, all with a focus on addiction.

Above all, the Counseling Center had doubled in size during the epidemic. It now occupied some of Portsmouth’s many abandoned buildings, and provided jobs to two hundred people, most of whom were in recovery and had criminal records.

The Counseling Center employed Jarrett Withrow, who’d been part of that ironworking crew that went to Florida and found a pill haven. Kathy Newman, who’d gone to David Procter for help with pain from her car accident, was now clean and working at the Counseling Center, too. Addicts intent on recovery could now have fun without drinking or using dope. The Counseling Center opened the Clubhouse, the largest drug-free hangout of its kind in Ohio. It held dances and card games and 12-step meetings.

Managing the Clubhouse, of all people, was Mary Ann Henson. Mary Ann, facing felonies, had finally gotten clean in 2010. Her husband, Keith Henson, had stopped using, too. Their son, Luke, was eight, and with two sober parents he was a chipper kid, a redhead with a big mouth of pearly teeth. Now in her forties, Mary Ann was a soccer mom, squiring Luke around, and mothering the newly recovering folks who hung out at the Clubhouse.

Angie Thuma, the veteran Walmart shoplifter, was hoping one day for a job at the Counseling Center. She was twenty months clean and working as a cashier for minimum wage, earning $230 a week, with which she supported her two sons while living with her parents. Shoplifting charges got her banned from Walmart, so shopping now was a chore. And she wasn’t going to apply for the assistant manager’s job where she worked, fearing a background check would reveal her past.

Yet, she told me the last time we spoke, “when I think about all the things I went through and I’m still alive, it gives you courage to keep bettering yourself.”

That seemed to be Portsmouth’s attitude. The town still looked as scarred and beaten as an addict’s arm. Wild-eyed hookers strolled the East End railroad tracks, and too many jobs paid minimum wage and led nowhere. Portsmouth still had hundreds of drug addicts and dealers. But it also now had a confident, muscular culture of recovery that competed with the culture of getting high—a community slowly patching itself.

Proof of that was that addicts from all over Ohio were now migrating south to get
clean
in Portsmouth. No place in Ohio had the town’s recovery infrastructure.

On my last trip to Portsmouth, I met a young woman from Johnstown, a rural town northeast of Columbus that from her description sounded a lot like the 740 that RWR rapped about. She had been buying heroin from the Xalisco Boys in Columbus for a couple years. When she tried to quit, a driver who spoke English called her for a week straight.

“But, señorita, we have really good stuff. It just came in.”

Finally, she threw away her phone. There wasn’t much on it but dope contacts anyway. She was twenty-three, alone with a ten-month-old son, and—seeking to get clean with nowhere else to turn—she found refuge in Portsmouth.

“I love it here. I’m really afraid to go back,” she told me in the lilting drawl of rural Ohio, when we met at a party for a woman celebrating her first year clean.

So the battered old town had hung on. It was, somehow, a beacon embracing shivering and hollow-eyed junkies, letting them know that all was not lost. That at the bottom of the rubble was a place just like them, kicked and buried but surviving. A place that had, like them, shredded and lost so much that was precious but was nurturing it again. Though they were adrift, they, too, could begin to find their way back.

Back to that place called Dreamland.

Acknowledgments

A
s this book tells a story that spreads nationwide, I encountered and relied on people across America for help in telling it.

I met parents transformed by this epidemic, and the loss of children, into activists of one sort or another: Carol Wagner, Margie Fleitman, Barbara Theodosiou, Susan Klimusko, Jodi Barber, Krissy McAfee, Tracy Morrison and her daughter Jenna. Wayne Campbell spent many hours with me and allowed me to attend his Tyler’s Light presentation. Jo Anna Krohn sat with me several times sharing the story of her son Wes, and the creation of SOLACE. Paul and Ellen Schoonover, and their son Myles, were kind enough to share the story of how Matt had died. I believe they understand that this problem has spread because people have remained silent. I am grateful to them for sharing their story.

In Denver, Dennis Chavez was, of course, a fountain of information about the Xalisco Boys, a term for them that he coined and I borrowed for this book. I also spent time with other police officers who helped me understand how the Xalisco Boys were working in Denver today: Jimmy Edinger, Jes Sandoval, Nicole Shacklee, Dale Wallis, and Teresa Driscoll-Rael. I spoke also with several junkies who shared their thoughts. My wonderful aunt and uncle, Cal and Dick Van Pelt, provided me with welcome lodging in the Denver area.

Several people in Charlotte were kind enough to spend time with me to talk about the Xalisco Boys in that city. I spent a lot of time with Detective Brent Foushee, who also shared with me his master’s thesis on the topic. Grateful appreciation also to Detective Don Queen, attorney Rob Heroy, deputy county prosecutor Sheena Gatehouse, Bob Martin from the Carolina Medical Center. Charlotte police officer Chris Long, a narcotics investigator, was the first law enforcement officer in the country to confirm to me that all these crews of heroin traffickers were in fact from the same town, and that that town was Xalisco, Nayarit. In South Carolina, I thank Dean Bishop, Max Dorsey, Marvin Brown, and Walter Beck. I spoke with, and thank, other assorted folks as well, police officers and the opposite of police officers, whose names I can’t include here.

In Columbus and Marion, Ohio, I’m grateful to many people who helped me understand the black tar heroin problem, but also the gravity of the state’s opiate plague: Columbus police captain Gary Cameron, Orman Hall, Judge Scott VanDerKarr, Andrea Boxcil, Ed Socie, Ronnie Pogue, Christy Beeghly, Jennifer Biddinger and the folks at the Ohio attorney general’s office, Sarah Nerad, Brad Belcher, Jennifer Miller, Dr. Richard Whitney, and the family of Dr. Phillip Prior. Dr. Joe Gay in Athens County, Ohio, was an early source, full of facts, perspective, and enthusiasm for the story.

In the state of Washington, I received essential help from Jaymie Mai, Jennifer Sabel, Caleb Banta-Green, Drs. Alex Cahana, John Loeser, David Tauben, Gary Franklin, Michael Schatman, and Michael Von Korff. I thank them for taking the time to help educate a reporter with a lot to learn.

One of the great pleasures of writing this story was visiting Portsmouth, Ohio, where people welcomed me and spoke forthrightly about their town. I am enormously grateful to Bryan Davis, Randy Schlegel, Joe Hale, Andrew Feight, Scott Douthat, Mary Ann and Keith Henson and their son, Luke, Terry Johnson, Danny Colley, Angie Thuma, Nate Payton, Kathy Newman, Melissa Fisher, Terry Ockerman, Chris Smith, John Lorentz, Jarrett Withrow, and Abbi Andre. As always, several others who helped me enormously probably prefer not to be named.

In Portsmouth, Ed Hughes spent many hours educating me on the multidisciplinary approach to drug rehabilitation and the history of the Counseling Center. Finally, Lisa Roberts was a huge fount of information about the town, its pill mill history, and the addiction that followed. I thank her also for the numerous contacts she provided me.

In Portland, Vitaliy and Elina Mulyar were nice enough to share their story with me, and help me understand the history of Russian Pentecostalism and the denomination’s battle with opiate addiction among its youth in America. Dr. Gary Oxman told me the story of his investigation that attempted to understand the spate of heroin overdoses in Portland in the 1990s. Federal prosecutor Kathleen Bickers was a wonderful and encouraging source of information on the Xalisco Boy phenomenon. Early on, Portland police lieutenant Mike Krantz helped me see the extent to which Xalisco heroin had invaded that town. I thank, too, Steve Mygrant, Wayne Baldassare, Tom Garrett, Sean Macomber, and John Deits.

The story of RAP was told to me by Ed Blackburn, Alan Levine, and others who I also thank but probably can’t name. I thank also Dr. Rachel Solotaroff at Central City Concern.

My dear friends Amy Kent and Steve Daggett, and their son, Colin, provided conversation and lodging that was a welcome respite from motel rooms while I was in Portland on several visits.

Folks in law enforcement from around the country were hugely helpful in adding their pieces to this nationwide puzzle. I thank Jim Kuykendall, Harry Sommers, Rob Smith and the Charlotte DEA, Adam Hardin and the South Carolina DEA, Chuvalo Truesdell, Dennis Mabry, Hal McDonough, Judge Seth Norman, Jeri Holladay Thomas, Chris Valdez, Rock Stone, Frank Harrell, Leo Arreguin, Lisa Feldman, and William Mickle, and some others whose names I cannot print here.

In Boise, Idaho, Ed Ruplinger very generously shared with me his recollections of the case he made against the Xalisco Boys, one of the first in the country. I also thank Steve Robinson and Joe Wright for their help.

Early on, as I attempted to track the Xalisco Boys to towns around America, I spoke with narcotics officers of various kinds, too many to mention, who helped by confirming, or not, the presence of the Nayarit traffickers in their areas.

From the small town of Xalisco, Nayarit, a major center of heroin supply to the United States, I spoke with numerous traffickers, drivers, telephone operators, and suppliers. Most would speak only of what they did, and would not discuss the activities of others. This was especially true of the man known as Enrique. I was happy to listen under any conditions they imposed. Most were or are in U.S. prisons, which I find are wonderfully contemplative places to sit and talk with people. Now, if only federal prison wardens would understand that in their custody are people who can tell the entire story of Mexican trafficking to the United States, that this is an important story for the public to hear, and that making it easier on a reporter trying to tell it wouldn’t kill them. To those prison officials who did help in that regard, I say thank you. I also spoke with people from Xalisco: professionals, business owners, and some others. Most I tried to know only by first names, for their protection and my own. But even these I’ll keep private, though I thank them nonetheless.