Dreamland (7 page)

In fact, the United States achieved something like this state of affairs in the period this book is about: the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. When I returned home from Mexico during those years, I noticed a scary obesity emerging. It wasn’t just the people. Everything seemed obese and excessive. Massive Hummers and SUVs were cars on steroids. In some of the Southern California suburbs near where I grew up, on plots laid out with three-bedroom houses in the 1950s, seven-thousand-square-foot mansions barely squeezed between the lot lines, leaving no place for yards in which to enjoy the California sun.

In Northern California’s Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, 1960s hippies became the last great American pioneers by escaping their parents’ artificial world. They lived in tepees without electricity and funded the venture by growing pot. Now their children and grandchildren, like mad scientists, were using chemicals and thousand-watt bulbs, in railroad cars buried to avoid detection, to forge hyperpotent strains of pot. Their weed rippled like the muscles of bodybuilders, and growing this stuff helped destroy the natural world that their parents once sought.

Excess contaminated the best of America. Caltech churned out brilliant students, yet too many of them now went not to science but to Wall Street to create financial gimmicks that paid off handsomely and produced nothing. Exorbitant salaries, meanwhile, were paid to Wall Street and corporate executives, no matter how poorly they did. Banks packaged rolls of bad mortgages and we believed Standard & Poor’s when they called them AAA. Well-off parents no longer asked their children to work when they became teenagers.

In Mexico, I gained new appreciation of what America means to a poor person limited by his own humble origins. I took great pride that America had turned more poor Mexicans into members of the middle class than had Mexico. Then I would return home and see too much of the country turning on this legacy in pursuit of comfort, living on credit, attempting to achieve happiness through more stuff. And I saw no coincidence that this was also when great new numbers of these same kids—most of them well-off and white—began consuming huge quantities of the morphine molecule, doping up and tuning out.

I looked up Andy Coop, who chairs the department of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

What gave the morphine molecule its immense power, he said, was that it evolved somehow to fit, key in lock, into the receptors that all mammals, especially humans, have in their brains and spines. The so-called
mu-
opioid receptors—designed to create pleasure sensations when they receive endorphins the body naturally produces—were especially welcoming to the morphine molecule. The receptor combines with endorphins to give us those glowing feelings at, say, the sight of an infant or the feel of a furry puppy. The morphine molecule overwhelms the receptor, creating a far more intense euphoria than anything we come by internally. It also produces drowsiness, constipation, and an end to physical pain. Aspirin had a limit to the amount of pain it could calm. But the more morphine you took, Coop said, the more pain was dulled.

For this reason, no plant has been more studied for its medicinal properties than the opium poppy. As the mature poppy’s petals fall away, a golf-ball-sized bulb emerges atop the stem. The bulb houses a goo that contains opium. From opium, humans have derived laudanum, codeine, thebaine, hydrocodone, oxymorphone, and heroin, as well as almost two hundred other drugs—all containing the morphine molecule, or variations of it. Etorphine, derived from thebaine, is used in dart guns to tranquilize rhinoceroses and elephants.

Tobacco, coca leaves, and other plants had evolved to be pleasurable and addictive to humans, Coop said. But the morphine molecule surpassed them in euphoric intensity. Then it exacted a mighty vengeance when a human dared to stop using it. In withdrawal from the drug, an addict left narcotized numbness and returned to life and to feeling. Numbed addicts were notoriously impotent; in withdrawal they had frequent orgasms as they began to feel again. Humans with the temerity to attempt to withdraw from the morphine molecule were tormented first with excruciating pain that lasted for days. If an addict was always constipated and nodding off, his withdrawals brought ferocious diarrhea and a week of sleeplessness.

The morphine molecule resembled a spoiled lover, throwing a tantrum as it left. Junkies I talked to, in fact, said they had an almost constipated tingling when trying to urinate during the end of withdrawal, as if the last of the molecule, now holed up in the kidney, was fighting like hell to keep from being expelled. Like a lover, no other molecule in nature provided such merciful pain relief, then hooked humans so completely, and punished them so mercilessly for wanting their freedom from it.

Certain parasites in nature exert the kind of control that makes a host act contrary to its own interests. One protozoan,
Toxoplasma gondii
, reproduces inside the belly of a cat, and is then excreted by the feline. One way it begins the cycle again is to infect a rat passing near the excrement.
Toxoplasma gondii
reprograms the infected rat to love cat urine, which to healthy rats is a predator warning. An infected rat wallows in cat urine, offering itself up as an easy meal to a nearby cat. This way, the parasite again enters the cat’s stomach, reproduces, and is expelled in the cat’s excrement—and the cycle continues.

The morphine molecule exerts an analogous brainwashing on humans, pushing them to act contrary to their self-interest in pursuit of the molecule. Addicts betray loved ones, steal, live under freeways in harsh weather, and run similarly horrific risks to use the molecule.

It became the poster molecule for an age of excess. No amount of it was ever enough. The molecule created ever-higher tolerance. Plus, it had a way of railing on when the body gathered the courage to throw it out. This wasn’t only during withdrawals. Most drugs are easily reduced to water-soluble glucose in the human body, which then expels them. Alone in nature, the morphine molecule rebelled. It resisted being turned into glucose and it stayed in the body.

“We still can’t explain why this happens. It just doesn’t follow the rules. Every other drug in the world—thousands of them—follows this rule. Morphine doesn’t,” Coop said. “It really is almost like someone designed it that way—diabolically so.”

Delivered Like Pizza

Denver, Colorado

In 1979, a young man fell into a job at the Denver Police Department. He was new in town, fresh from a broken engagement in his native Pueblo, Colorado.

Dennis Chavez never meant to be a cop. His family traced its roots back to a seventeenth-century Spanish conquistador. Four centuries later, Chavez’s father was a steelworker in Pueblo.

Chavez, a big guy, played football at the University of Colorado for a couple years in the 1970s before leaving the school. He worked construction. Then a friend recently hired on at Denver PD told him the work was fun and urged him to take the entrance test. Chavez passed it and within a few months was at the Denver Police Academy.

Early into his first year on patrol, however, a training officer told his friend that Chavez was failing, probably the dumbest in the new recruit class and almost certain to wash out before the year ended. That irked. Chavez put in extra time studying laws and the municipal code, exercising and adding new energy to his street work.

In time, his interest in sports channeled into power weight lifting. He cut his hair in a flattop, with lightning bolts cut into the sides and his badge number on the back of his head. Steroids were legal then. He would buy bodybuilding dope from a doctor who visited the gym where he lifted. Soon he was spending twelve hundred dollars a month on steroids and supplements. He was six feet four, 250 pounds, and muscles bulged from him as if his body were a squeezed balloon. Dennis Chavez was a ferocious cat back then, shaking hands with an iron grip, clubbing friends on the shoulders when he saw them. He arrived at every 911 call like a pit bull, pulling for action. When he barked, “How you doing?” at friends, it sounded like a cross between an interrogation and a command. Even cops tried to avoid him.

He was obsessed with his job, which he took to mean arresting bad guys. A lieutenant once criticized him for not writing enough tickets. As training officer to new recruits, the lieutenant said, Chavez wasn’t showing them enough balance to his police work.

“That’s not what I do,” Chavez told the lieutenant. “I find felons.”

He spent his first years on the force learning from a cop named Robert Wallis. Wallis was the department’s version of a supercop. He made major arrests all the time. He and his partner were involved in more than a dozen shootings, which to Chavez meant that Wallis was always getting in the way of the worst bad guys. Wallis was a guy he wanted to emulate. Wallis taught him about prison tattoos, and recognizing the look of a guy on the lam in line at a downtown shelter. From Wallis, Chavez learned early on that most crime is connected to illegal drugs, so understanding that world was crucial to good police work.

Heroin particularly interested Chavez. Back then, Mexican American families controlled the trade in Denver. But as Chavez worked them and arrested them, he heard they were being supplied by men from a place in Mexico called Nayarit. The name meant nothing to Chavez, but for years it kept coming up. The Nayarits sold a substance he hadn’t seen before. Heroin in Denver up to then had been all light-brown powder. This Nayarit heroin, however, was dark and sticky and looked like Tootsie Rolls or rat feces. They called it black tar and Chavez heard stories they cut it with boiled-down Coca-Cola.

As the years passed, meanwhile, what Dennis Chavez realized he loved most about his job was the deduction of crime. It was the immersion in it, finding the thread of a criminal and his MO. Once, a serial rapist was striking across Denver. Chavez had taken the statement of the last victim, a high school girl, who, in tears, grabbed his hand and made him promise that he would catch the guy. Victims said the rapist held a Buck knife to them as he assaulted them. Chavez charted the rapist’s attacks—his times, dates, locations. He staked out the southeast Denver neighborhood where he thought the guy would hit next. One night he saw a man walking down an alley and just knew it was the guy. Then the man jaywalked. Chavez stopped him and arrested him for carrying a concealed Buck knife in his pants. Victims came to the station house that night and identified Chavez’s arrestee as their rapist.

A few years into the job, Dennis Chavez woke one morning unable to see, his heart pounding like an overheated piston. His girlfriend took him to the hospital. A doctor told him he was going to have a stroke if he didn’t let up.

“You can die young and good-looking, or years from now fat and happy,” the doctor said.

Dennis Chavez opted for the latter. He backed off the steroids and coffee, and stopped power lifting. He took up aikido and long rides into the Colorado mountains on his Harley. Later, he founded a club of officers who rode motorcycles and raised money for charities.

He mellowed. His police work changed, too. His affinity for sleuthing didn’t flag. But no longer the pit bull, he had to develop other skills. Among these was the cultivation of snitches and, with that, a personality that other people wanted to be around. Finding informants was not hard, really. He’d arrest a guy and tell him he could work off the case by setting up others. Eventually that could lead to cash payments to the informant. What was hard was managing the relationship, particularly when the informant went from working off his case to making a salary from it. The best snitches were the ones who stayed in it and would do anything for their handlers. These relationships required finesse and a soothing personality that let an informant know that Chavez liked him and would protect him. It meant going against the book from time to time—accepting Christmas presents, for example, and giving them in return.

Informants became particularly important when, in 1995, Dennis Chavez joined the narcotics unit of the Denver Police Department. He was bequeathed his first long-term informant by a sergeant leaving the unit. The sergeant introduced Chavez to a man immersed in Denver’s Mexican heroin underworld.

Chavez never had much connection to Mexico. His father had forbidden Spanish in the house so his children wouldn’t speak accented English. But Chavez could see the Denver drug world changing. Mexican American dealer families were going to prison, dying, moving away. Mexicans stepped into the void, and when that happened, Chavez began hearing about the state of Nayarit all the time. The heroin in Denver was all black tar now.

In the late 1980s, he saw guys from Nayarit walking around downtown selling heroin to anyone who’d walk up to them. He arrested many of them, and found Nayarit on a map, but it still didn’t mean much. He saw them move into cars and drive it around to customers. Mexicans were arrested at the bus station with backpacks and a kilo or two of the drug. But Chavez still had no sense for how this fit together, if it did at all.

Until one day, when his informant said to him, “You know they’re all from the same town, right?”

I met Dennis Chavez at a Mexican restaurant in north Denver, where he told me the story of how he began tracking the Nayarit heroin connection. He said he was intrigued by what the informant told him—that all that he was seeing related to heroin in Denver originated in one small town in Mexico. He prodded the man for more.

What Chavez had been seeing on the streets, the informant said—the dealers, the couriers with backpacks of heroin, the drivers with balloons of heroin—all looks very random and scattered, but it’s not. It’s all connected.