Prologue
Two years into a twenty-three-year prison sentence, on a day pushing 100 degrees, Ronnie Jones had his first visitor. I’d spent almost a year listening to police and prosecutors describe Jones, imprisoned for armed heroin distribution, as a predator. After three months of requests, I walked along the manicured entranceway of Hazelton Federal Correctional Institution on the outskirts of Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. The air was so thick that the flags framing the concrete-block structure hung there drooping, as still as the razor wire that scalloped the roofs.
In the state’s northeastern crook, bordering Pennsylvania to the north and Maryland to the east, Preston County had once been dominated by strip-mining. But by the mid-2000s, most of the mines had shut down, and the prison had taken over as the county’s largest employer, with eight hundred guards and staff.
My August 2016 interview had taken several weeks to arrange with the Bureau of Prisons pecking order in Washington, D.C., but first I had to navigate weeks of curt back-and-forth with Jones, over the prison’s monitored email, to get his OK. “Exactly who have you spoken to as of today that was involved with my case?” he wanted to know. What personal information about him did I intend to use?
Jones agreed to let me visit, finally, because he wanted his daughters, in kindergarten and first grade when their dad was arrested in June 2013, to understand “there’s a different side of me,” as he put it. The last they’d seen him, a week before his arrest, he had delivered birthday cupcakes to their school.
I thought of the “tsunami of misery” Jones had first unleashed in Woodstock, Virginia, as his prosecutor put it, before it fanned out in waves over the northwestern region of the state and into some of Washington’s western bedroom communities in 2012 and 2013. In just a few months’ time, Jones was presiding over the largest heroin ring in the region, transforming a handful of users into hundreds.
As I made my way to the prison, I calculated the human toll, the hundreds of addicted people who ended up dopesick when their heroin supply was suddenly cut by Jones’s arrest: throwing up and sweating and shitting their pants. When Jones was jailed in 2013, many of the newly addicted Woodstock users began carpooling to the nearest big cities—Baltimore, Washington, and even Martinsburg, West Virginia, aka Little Baltimore—to score drugs, converging on known heroin hot spots and playing drug-dealer Russian roulette.
I didn’t yet know that a single batch of heroin was about to land in Huntington, West Virginia, four hours west of Jones’s cell, that would halt the breathing of twenty-six people in a single day, before the week was out. Those overdoses were fueled by the latest synthetic opioid, carfentanil, imported from China with a stroke on a computer keyboard. Carfentanil is an elephant sedative one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, which is twenty-five to fifty times stronger than heroin. For the fifth year in a row, the state of West Virginia’s indigent burial-assistance program was about to exhaust its funds from interring opioid-overdose victims.
Similar surges were happening across the country, from Florida to Sacramento to Barre, Vermont. Every person I interviewed that summer, from treatment providers to parents of the addicted to the judges who were sending the addicted to prison or jail, was growing more burdened by the day. The enormity of America’s drug problem was finally dawning on them and on the rest of us—two decades after the opioid epidemic first took root. (Although the word “opiate” historically refers to drugs derived from the opium poppy and “opioid” to chemical versions, the now more widely accepted term “opioid” is used in this book for both forms of painkillers.)
Drug overdose had already taken the lives of 300,000 Americans over the past fifteen years, and experts now predicted that 300,000 more would die in only the next five. It is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of fifty, killing more people than guns or car accidents, at a rate higher than the HIV epidemic at its peak.
The rate of casualties is so unprecedented that it’s almost impossible to look at the total number dead—and at the doctors and mothers and teachers and foster parents who survive them—and not wonder why the nation’s response has been so slow in coming and so impotently executed when it finally did.
Ronnie Jones had run one of the largest drug rings in the mid-Atlantic United States, a region with some of the highest overdose rates in the nation. But I wasn’t driving to West Virginia for epidemiological insights or even a narrative of redemption from Jones.
I’d been dispatched to prison by a specific grieving mother, clutching a portrait of her nineteen-year-old son. I wanted to understand the death of Jesse Bolstridge, a robust high school football player barely old enough to grow a patchy beard on his chin.
What exactly, his mother wanted to know, had led to the death of her only son?
I’d been trying to address that same question for more than five years, in one form or another, for several mothers I knew. But now I had someone I could ask.
*
Three months before visiting Jones, in the spring of 2016, Kristi Fernandez and I stood next to Jesse’s grave on a rolling hillside in Strasburg, Virginia, in the shadow of Signal Knob. She’d asked me to meet her at one of her regular cemetery stops, on her way home from work, so I could see how she’d positioned his marker, just so, at the edge of the graveyard.
It was possible to stand at Jesse’s headstone—emblazoned with the foot-high number 55, in the same font as the lettering on his Strasburg Rams varsity jersey—and look down on the stadium where he had once summoned the crowd to its feet simply by running onto the field and pumping his arms.
In a small town where football is as central to identity as the nearby Civil War battlefields dotting the foothills of the Blue Ridge, Jesse loved nothing more than making the hometown crowd roar.
He had always craved movement, the choke on his internal engine revving long after his peers had mastered their own. As a toddler, he staunchly refused to nap, succumbing to sleep on the floor midplay, an action figure in one hand and a toy car in the other. This restlessness was part of the epidemic’s story, too, I would later learn. So were the drugs Jesse’s high school buddies pilfered from their parents’ and grandparents’ medicine cabinets—the kind of leftovers that pile up after knee-replacement surgery or a blown back.
Jesse had been a ladies’ man, the boy next door, a jokester who began most of his sentences with the word “Dude.” When he left his house on foot, the neighbors did a double take, marveling at the trail of cats shadowing him as he walked.
Kristi pointed out the cat’s paw she had engraved at the base of Jesse’s headstone, right next to the phrase miss you more, a family shorthand they had the habit of using whenever they talked by phone.
“I miss you,” she’d say.
“Miss you more,” he’d tell her.
“Miss you more,” she’d answer. And on and on.
Kristi takes pride in the way the family maintains Jesse’s grave, switching out the holiday decorations, adding kitschy trinkets, wiping away the rain-splashed mud. “It’s the brightest one here,” his younger twin sisters like to say as they sweep away the errant grass clippings.
When I pulled into the cemetery for our first meeting, Kristi had taken it as an omen that my license plate included Jesse’s number, 55. She’s always looking for signs from Jesse—a glint of sun shining through the clouds, a Mother’s Day brunch receipt for $64.55. To her, my license plate number meant our meeting was Jesse-sanctioned and Jesse-approved.