“Roanoke is just big enough where all the stories meet.”
*
The skin-popping weathermen represented Roanoke’s first wake-up call. But it was wrongly viewed, by myself and other area journalists, as an anomaly. The story was so tawdry that the Roanoke Times assigned two beat reporters to track it, one from courts and the other from media and entertainment. It received much more attention, for instance, than the national story that broke in our backyard when Purdue Pharma settled with the feds a year later.
Before the weathermen incident, heroin had been the domain of police and court reporters in Roanoke, widely believed to be an inner-city (read: black) drug. “In the ’80s and ’90s, maybe a few dozen people were doing heroin here,” said Don Wolthuis, the assistant U.S. attorney who became one of the federal government’s top heroin prosecutors in the state’s western half. “Because heroin is a depressant, people kind of withdraw; they go in a corner, shoot up, and sit there in the dark, in a fetal position. They weren’t out there committing crimes like with crack or meth. It was a largely invisible and isolated group.”
It was common knowledge back then, among the handful of mostly African-American heroin users and dealers in Roanoke, “that you don’t sell heroin to white people because they’ll turn you in,” as Wolthuis put it. In the mid-2000s, it was also common knowledge that the stronger and more dangerous the heroin, the more users yearned to have it, as Roanoke addiction researcher Warren Bickel, then working in Baltimore, described it.
“Herr-on is my girlfriend,” one of his patients told him, adopting the street pronunciation for the drug popular among African-American users. He’d come to Bickel’s lab with track marks on his neck—all his other veins were spent.
And what this patient wanted Bickel to know was no different than what the Lee County farmer meant when he told his doctor how OxyContin had stolen everything from him: Nothing’s more powerful than the morphine molecule, and once it has its hooks in you, nothing matters more.
Not love. Not family. Not sex. Not shelter. The only relationship that matters is between you and the drug.
Bickel went on to scientifically quantify the indifference of the typical opioid user, comparing the average nonaddicted person’s perception of the future—calculated to be 4.7 years—against an addicted user’s idea of the future, which is just nine days.
The first time I interviewed him, in 2016, Bickel said he hoped to design treatment methods that would not only predict future addictive behavior among children but might also help those at risk of becoming addicted improve and extend their temporal views, therefore arming themselves against the scourge.
Though he’d won prestigious grants and awards for his groundbreaking work—he was often touted as a star of the growing Brain City constellation—I struggled to understand how Bickel’s research applied to the real-life heroin users I knew, some of whom were now trading sex for drug money a few blocks from his office.
Could a Bickel-designed app have prevented Jesse Bolstridge’s death? Where was the hope? When I asked him those questions, he pointed to a framed Chinese proverb that he takes inspiration from: “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”
But the larger question about hope continued to reverberate wherever I went. I heard a version of it from an overwhelmed family friend, who pulled me aside at a wedding party to tell me about her thirty-four-year-old addicted daughter and pleaded with me through tears: “Just tell me one thing, what can your book do to help me keep my daughter alive?”
My friend was discovering the same thing through experience that I was through my interviews: that the legal and medical structures meant to combat America’s heroin epidemic were woefully disconnected, often at odds with one another, and full of unintended consequences.
*
A crack-turned-heroin-dealer with Philadelphia roots landed in Roanoke in 2006, the same time the weathermen began sweating through their long-sleeved shirts. Clifton “Lite” Lee made heroin an equal-opportunity drug, connecting with drug users, black and white, and figuring—correctly—that he could easily double his profit margin if he imported the drug to comparatively staid Roanoke rather than continue selling it solely in New Jersey and New York. When police caught two suburban teenagers middlemanning for Lee—selling heroin to their friends and keeping some for their own use—they were stunned by what their cellphones revealed: evidence implicating fifty other kids they’d been selling heroin to. Most attended Hidden Valley High School, in outlying Roanoke County’s wealthiest neighborhood, home to insurance agents and doctors and lawyers.
“Lee was the guy willing to get the kids involved,” Wolthuis said, pulling out a handwritten organizational chart he’d put together to help him keep visual track. At the top of the pyramid were the nonusers like Lee, who were in it just for the money, and at the bottom were the addicted, including some whose names were crossed out—dead of overdose.
By the time Lee was sentenced to eleven years in prison, in 2008, prosecutors had pinned him with bringing a thousand bags of heroin into the region two to three times a week, paying $5,000 for twenty bricks of heroin that his network then sold for $30,000.
The growth in heroin users was as exponential as its 600 percent profit margin. The first bags sold in Roanoke were stamped with the names Funeral and Green Frog, and some had a purity of 90 percent, a concentration that addicted users quickly and made the dosages deadlier.
“I can remember lying in bed awake at night, thinking, how far is this thing gonna go?” Wolthuis said. “If you have a guy doing a chain of bank robberies, you catch him and the robberies stop.” But the problem with heroin is the lure of the morphine molecule. Herr-on is my girlfriend. Even as Wolthuis locked up the perpetrators, he suspected that the demand for heroin was already too entrenched. There were still plenty of user-sellers eager to get on the nearest heroin highway to fetch a new batch from Baltimore or Richmond or Paterson, New Jersey. Unlike Ronnie Jones and Clifton Lee, they didn’t aspire to get rich dealing dope. They just wanted to keep from getting dopesick.
*
The story of Clifton Lee and the addicts he serviced and created didn’t trickle down to me at the newspaper, where I wrote about family issues, until 2010. That year, the region’s only heroin-overdose death made headlines, not because it was unique but because it involved the twenty-one-year-old son of a prominent white businesswoman.
No one was paying attention to heroin arrests when they only concerned the children of inner-city black families. A 2009 Roanoke Times story suggesting that heroin was now closing in on the illicit use of OxyContin and prescribed fentanyl patches in popularity seemed to draw shrugs, even as one prosecutor publicly warned, “They’re skipping over pot and going straight to heroin.”
Wolthuis may have been lying in bed worrying about Spencer Mumpower’s role in his classmate Scott Roth’s death, but no one, not even the do-gooders giving drug-prevention lectures in local high schools, talked about the kids left behind who were still using. It was as if heroin had settled peaceably into Hidden Valley, with its manicured lawns and attached multiple-car garages, and Scott and Spencer were the only two exposed. Hidden Valley was the perfect name.
*
Scott Roth bought the heroin that ended his life in an apartment in Roanoke’s Grandin Village, a retail hub fifteen minutes from the Hidden Valley split-level where he was raised. A neighborhood where locals dine on regionally sourced produce, take yoga classes, watch subtitled movies, spend thousands on Stickley sofas, and crowd the weekly farmer’s market, the village is full of tree-lined streets and solid 1920s-era brick homes with expansive carports.