In a quaint town full of historical markers and pricey antiques, the bank robbery in Woodstock made headlines across the Shenandoah Valley. Brandon’s mother, Laura Hadden, begged the local newspaper to write about the growing heroin scourge. Her son wasn’t the only one buying pills and heroin from mules and commuter dealers driving to Baltimore, she told an editor. “But they blew me off. It was more interesting to write about my son being arrested for robbing a bank!” she said.
Just before Brandon left for prison, in 2011, the local sheriff teamed with school prevention workers to hold the first community-wide meeting about opioid addiction.
Stigma was the real enemy of hope for the drug-addicted, Hadden decided. So to tamp it down, she decided her job was to explain the misunderstood science of addiction: Once a person becomes addicted, he loses his power of choice; his free will becomes hijacked along with the opioid receptors in his brain. When a person’s natural opioids are shut down by the deluge of synthetic ones, she told the audience at the community meeting, it creates a growing tolerance to the drug, making the brain crave ever-larger quantities of opioids just to keep from being violently ill.
Hadden asked the parents to imagine this: You haven’t been able to eat for three days, and you’re starving. Then someone shoves a plate of delicious food in front of you and leaves you alone with it—but it’s strictly off-limits.
Because of the urge to quell that insatiable hunger, she told them, young people in their midst were now “driving up to Baltimore, bringing the heroin back here, and selling it like crazy. People you don’t even think would be using heroin are using it.”
But Hadden’s lesson about dopamine-overloaded neurons and Baltimore drug deals fell on the deaf ears of the select attendees. No one wants to believe that heroin will ever touch the veins of their children.
“Maybe ten people showed up, and no one asked me a single question,” she recalled. “The response was a joke.”
Years later, not long after her son was released from prison, Hadden began a second, more urgent round of drug-prevention advocacy. Soon after Brandon got out, he moved to New York, to live near his father and his tight-knit extended Italian family, because it was almost impossible to get hired anywhere around Woodstock with a felony record.
Brandon was doing well at first, working for his dad and teaching bodybuilding on the side. But seven months after his release from prison, he relapsed. His family encouraged him to seek treatment, Hadden said, but it was as if some remote dictator had claimed eminent domain on his brain. He died two weeks later from an overdose of cocaine and heroin.
His mother believes her son died by suicide, driven by his outsized fear of becoming dopesick. “I wonder, to this day, whether he just couldn’t do it anymore,” she told me.
Two days before his death, Brandon posted on Facebook: “I hope people remember all the good I’ve done.”
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Kristi had not been among those Brandon’s mom tried to warn in 2011. If Jesse had any problem at all, she told herself, it had to do with pills, not heroin. But over the next year, her own mother’s wedding ring would turn up missing along with some cash and more pills. And Kristi could deny the severity of her son’s addiction no longer. Her husband, Jesse’s stepdad, insisted she install a lock on their bedroom door.
And though she still feels guilty about it, she did.
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In 2012 there weren’t yet Facebook groups to connect the suffering parents in different parts of the state, to share tips about rehab and coping strategies, or to offer physical and monetary support.
Back then Robin Roth felt as if she walked around Roanoke with a giant F on her forehead, branded as a parenting failure. She suffered in silence and anger, much of it directed toward the young man she held responsible for the death of her only child. At Spencer Mumpower’s 2012 federal court sentencing, Robin carried a framed portrait of Scott to the witness stand. She looked directly at Spencer, his dark mass of curly hair now neatly shorn, and leveled a litany of questions designed to make him understand the pain his actions had caused:
“Spencer, will you be there to visit me when I am old and lonely? Neither will Scott.
“Spencer, will you be there to eat dinner with me, mow my lawn, and wish me a happy birthday? Neither will Scott.
“Spencer, will you be there to hold my hand when I am sick and dying? Neither will Scott.”
Her anger was so palpable that U.S. District Court Judge James Turk, an affable octogenarian who shook every defendant’s hand and brought his dachshund mix, Baby Girl, to court, encouraged her to meet with Spencer before he left for prison. Turk had already sentenced the dealer who supplied the drugs to twenty years; Spencer had played middle man in the deal, pleading guilty and helping prosecutors nab his roommate dealer in exchange for a lighter, eight-year sentence.
“I think it would help you,” Turk told Robin, gently, from the bench, as Spencer sat.
But Robin declined, saying she wasn’t ready.
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In the summer of 2012, I followed Robin and Spencer as Spencer prepared for prison. I gave Spencer rides to karate classes, recording our conversations with his permission as I drove. At a KFC lunch buffet, I watched him cheerfully demonstrate a recipe he’d picked up during his earlier jail stint on state charges: blending packets of ketchup, Tabasco, and barbecue sauce.
I sat near his relatives as he graduated from drug court, looking childlike in his too-big suit. I spent a Saturday with him while he volunteered his time teaching first-time teenage drug offenders and their worried parents, who leaned in intently, trying to divine where Spencer’s parents had gone wrong. I found it impossible not to like the kid, honestly. I could ask him anything my mind conjured up, and he would answer me warmly and enthusiastically. He seemed more concerned about being honest than trying to control the narrative.
In a freewheeling talk full of advice and drug-detecting techniques that was half Scared Straight and half American Gangster, Spencer had parents alternately laughing, wincing, and crying as he displayed the needle-mark scars on his arms and the teeth once ruined by amphetamines, now restored by forty hours of dental work. He showed off his jailhouse tattoos, fashioned by burning Vaseline mixed with VO5 Shampoo and a contraband staple, though he’d since had those neatened up, too.
He discussed the dangers of black-market Adderall, an ADHD medicine and amphetamine he once took hourly for eight days straight. He recited a list of places where he’d hidden his stash as a teenager—inside computers, emptied Sharpie markers, and socks, and in the pockets of gym shorts he secretly wore under his jeans. “My mom made me empty the pockets of my jeans, but she didn’t know about the shorts,” he said.
He shared tips that, in my view, remain among the best prevention advice I’ve seen dispensed to parents of at-risk teens: Rid your medicine cabinets of anything that has codone, indicative of morphine components, in the name. Set rules and hold kids accountable when they break them, even if it means they go to jail. “The problem with me was, the trouble had to outweigh the fun,” he said. Though his mother, Ginger Mumpower, had sent him to fifteen different rehab facilities, for eight years Spencer managed to use and sell drugs before his name ever entered a police blotter.
He described what led to his decision to quit selling drugs after being targeted by local police in a catch-and-release drug bust in 2009. Hoping to convert him into a confidential informant, police had taken his drugs and told him, “We’re gonna wait for you to mess up again so we can catch you again and get you for more things,” Spencer recounted, an oversimplification that police only partially confirmed. The threat was enough to make him give up dealing, but in a case of warped reasoning he believed he could still keep using heroin without getting caught. He allowed his dealer to live with him in exchange for drugs.