Haddox said he resented the implication, and Sue Ella said she didn’t give a damn if he did. “I said, ‘Look, I’m an Appalachian scholar, and my family goes back here forever, and I take tremendous insult,’” she recalled.
She stormed out with the others, and the newspaper ad never ran.
*
The next day Friedman gathered with Richard Stallard and other law enforcement officers at Kathy’s Country Kitchen in the Lee County seat. Sister Beth Davies, the pluckiest of the three nuns who had answered the War on Poverty call, was in attendance.
So was pharmacist Greg Stewart, a miner’s son whose parents had personally helped build the St. Charles clinic. When Stewart filled OxyContin prescriptions, he begged his customers to lock their medication up. He’d already been the victim of two robbery attempts, including one by the son of a neighboring hair-salon owner who crawled in through the ceiling vents connecting the salon to Stewart’s store.
When Purdue Pharma offered to put $100,000 toward expanding the county’s drug treatment and law enforcement efforts, Stewart said he was inclined to accept the donation as partial payback, considering the fortune the company was making off the area’s misery. Van Zee and Sue Ella agreed, and even drafted a letter of acceptance after the meeting. Sue Ella explained that she was initially for accepting the money “because of my experience with the coal companies taking and taking and taking, and all the companies, they sit up north with their inherited wealth and leave nothing behind except broken bodies.”
But Sister Beth, the five-foot-tall redheaded nun, was having none of it. The executives might be able to intimidate the people up north, where their philanthropy held sway in places like Harvard and Manhattan. But Beth was a formidable New Yorker herself, with a master’s from Columbia. More important, she’d grown up under the tutelage of high-powered nuns who ran hospitals and colleges with a firm hand but a fair eye, and a mother who read a book every day.
A Staten Island native, Sister Beth had worked in Stamford, Connecticut, Purdue’s hometown, where she ran a Catholic school before moving to Appalachia in 1971. A former student of hers from Connecticut had recently called to apologize, in fact; he was a reporter at the Stamford newspaper, which had been strongly encouraged not to write anything critical of the company, she said.
In 1996, the same year OxyContin was introduced, Sister Beth had stood up to a crowd of sixty coal miners and executives and their lawyers—all men—to demand the Lone Mountain coal company make reparations for the havoc caused by one of its faulty coal-slurry ponds. A liner had burst, sending wastewater screaming through the village of St. Charles. The water unloosed a boulder that rammed a resident’s house, flooded other homes, scattered coal waste and litter for miles along the Powell River—endangering fish and mussel beds—and generally scared people half to death.
That event pitted company miners from other camps (forced to defend the company or lose their pay for the day) against local miners whose community had been devastated by the flood. Lone Mountain’s defense, as articulated by one of the outsider miners: The town was already full of litter and “Pamper trees”; therefore, the flooding was simply another “act of nature” unleashed on an already diaper-scarred landscape.
Health care administrator Tony Lawson remembered the way Sister Beth stood up in that meeting—“this tiny little thin woman who was so angry the paper she was holding with her statement shook in her hands. But she spoke loud and clear to all those men in that audience. She was absolutely the most fearless, bravest person I’ve ever seen.”
The executives glared, and the hired miners booed, but Sister Beth didn’t waver. Though the coal company eventually paid to clean up the mess—not nearly enough, in the nun’s opinion—the flood of slurry-pond waste was an ominous harbinger for St. Charles.
If the Purdue executives thought that people like Sue Ella and Sister Beth could be bought, they had not done their homework. Both had stood on the picket lines with strikers and their families for nine life-and-death months in 1989, when the Pittston Coal Company wanted such huge union-contract concessions as reduced pay-in to retired miners’ health insurance and wage cuts. Sister Beth had literally lain on the ground, to block the coal trucks, while Sue Ella stood next to the striking miners with her six-month-old baby in a carrier.
Over the years, Sue Ella’s and Sister Beth’s lives had been threatened because of their social activism, including once when Beth convinced an illiterate coal miner not to sign away all company liability for a mining accident. (“Greed makes people violent,” she told an interviewer in 1982. “When we stand with the least in the struggle for justice, there’s a price to pay.”)
The Purdue offer was just another page in an old story. This is what happens when wealthy people think they own you, Sister Beth told her Lee County friends. Since the first piece of coal was chiseled from the first mountainside rock by a large out-of-state corporation, the region had suffered from a pattern of exploitation, she said, ticking off all the mining-company executives who’d flown in over the years and spread their money around trying to buy peace, and then shut down unions, reduced black-lung benefits, and kept other industries out to maintain low labor costs.
Sister Beth thought about all the firsts she was starting to see at her Addiction Education Center in Pennington Gap, where she and Van Zee were now conferring daily over their mutual patients, among them young women now prostituting themselves for drug money. She thought about the high school senior, a cheerleader, snorting OxyContin in the school library. About the people having their teeth pulled for the sole purpose of eliciting an Oxy prescription from a dentist. About the middle-aged woman who’d ruefully remarked in the middle of being fingerprinted and photographed that she was wearing the same gray sweatpants she’d had on the last time she was arrested for distributing OxyContin. “I’d burn those if I were you,” a sheriff’s deputy quipped.
But it wasn’t funny to Sister Beth.
She recalled the first phone call she’d taken about the drug, in the late 1990s. The informant had told the cop. The cop called the pharmacist. The pharmacist called Sister Beth. It was another game of telephone, only this message remained tragically on point:
“Beth, you wait,” pharmacist Stewart had told her on the phone. “They’re saying it’s nonaddictive, but you mark my words: This is the beginning of a disaster for us.”
The disaster was now in full bloom. And Sue Ella and Sister Beth guessed exactly where it was headed. Even if Big Pharma and the pill-mill doctors could be brought to justice, the morphine molecule was so deadly, its lure so intractable, that those who were already addicted were likely to be ruled by it for the rest of their lives.
Sister Beth threatened to quit the coalition if anyone accepted Purdue Pharma’s $100,000 grant, and Van Zee’s letter of acceptance was never sent. The grant was nothing more than “blood money,” she said, and the coalition agreed.
Poff Federal Building, Roanoke, Virginia
Chapter Three
Message Board Memorial
While regional reporters from Boston and Roanoke were unpacking the damage done in their rural outposts, the story of the burgeoning OxyContin epidemic didn’t hit the national media until February 9, 2001, when New York Times reporter Barry Meier and a colleague swooped in just north of Lee County for a front-page story on Operation OxyFest, a nine-month federal investigation that had produced the biggest drug-abuse raid in Kentucky history. “We caught 207” user-dealers, a federal prosecutor told Meier. Most of those arrested were patients who had coaxed pills out of doctors who were either busy, slipshod, or quietly cooperative in overprescribing the drug. “We didn’t catch half of them; that’s how pervasive this thing is.”