While Ronnie Jones was establishing his clientele in the northern Shenandoah Valley, young people in Roanoke were driving right past Woodstock on their way to Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Newark, or taking the Chinatown bus to New York, where they could pay $100 for fifty bags of heroin, stamped with names like Blue Magic or Gucci, then resell them in Roanoke for six to eight times their investment.
A drug-use survey of Roanoke-area high school students bore out the trend. In the fall of 2012, 6.4 percent reported using heroin one or more times, and almost 10 percent said they’d tried illicit prescription drugs. A local prevention counselor warned that the two percentages were in the process of flipping because heroin was becoming so much cheaper and easier to get.
The Families Anonymous meetings in town were filling up. Six years had passed since the weathermen’s final forecast, and the storm had settled in.
While Robin Roth searched for solace in sunflowers and Ginger Mumpower relaxed for the first time in years—knowing that in prison, at least, her son would likely not die of a drug overdose—parents up and down America’s heroin highways struggled to find the right culprit, or set of culprits, to blame.
But mostly they kept quiet about it, shut down in their grief and their shame.
Hidden Valley High School, Roanoke County, Virginia
Chapter Six
“Like Shooting Jesus”
An hour south of Roanoke, in a part of the state once dominated by unfettered industry, Martinsville, Virginia, was stuck in an economic morass. In 2012 the small city of thirteen thousand laid claim to having the highest unemployment rate in Virginia for twelve years. For most of the twentieth century, it had been the state’s industrial powerhouse, packed with textile and furniture factories, home to more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation. But nearly half its jobs went away when the millionaires sent the textile work to Honduras and Mexico in the wake of NAFTA in 1994, and the furniture jobs to China after that.
Bill Clinton had predicted that China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization would eventually create a “win-win” for workers. American companies would theoretically be able to export products to China’s growing consumer class, an argument Wall Street championed when stock prices climbed with every new plant-closing announcement. Corporate shareholders and CEOs ate up Clinton’s prediction, a cheery best-case version of Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century “invisible hand.” As the economists described it, Chinese peasants would better their lot by making chairs in factories, while dislocated American workers would retrain for more fulfilling, advanced jobs.
But with ill-designed training for displaced Americans based on a lumbering federal program created in the 1960s, the second part of that equation very rarely came to pass. Only a third of workers who qualified for Trade Adjustment Assistance even went back to school, and the majority of those who did found themselves with new certifications and associate’s degrees yet earning much less than they had in the factories, if they were working at all. The ones I met who were coping the best worked part-time at Walmart, supplementing their pay with food stamps, food pantry donations, and small vegetable gardens.
Consumers all got cheaper jeans, yes, but what did that matter to the people who had once stitched them if they were now out of work and couldn’t afford new clothes? The global economy created winners and losers, Bassett Furniture CEO Rob Spilman told me, explaining the dismissal of some eight thousand furniture workers from his payroll. “It was that or perish,” he said. “At the end of the day, we are not a social experiment.”
In rural counties decimated by globalization, automation, and the decline of coal, the invisible hand manifested in soaring crime, food insecurity, and disability claims. In Martinsville and surrounding Henry County, unemployment rates rose to above 20 percent, food stamp claims more than tripled, and disability rates went up 60.4 percent.
What those numbers looked like on the ground, as I began reporting on the recession in 2008 for the Roanoke Times and later for my first book, Factory Man (published in 2014), could be distilled in two images I observed but did not fully, at the time, comprehend:
The first was of adults—black and white, old and young—arriving at area food pantries two hours before the doors opened, the older among them clutching canes or leaning on walkers. The second was the smoldering remains of an abandoned furniture factory in the town of Bassett, near Martinsville. An unemployed thirty-four-year-old was attempting to rip out copper electrical wires to resell on the black market when he inadvertently sparked a fire that burned the shuttered factory down. In his police mug shot, you could see the burns on his face.
It was easy to understand the connection between joblessness and hunger, to get that hunger fueled some of the crime. It was growing clearer, too, that the federal disability program was becoming a de facto safety net for the formerly employed, a well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous way of incentivizing poor people to stay sick, with mental illness and chronic pain—conditions that are hard to prove and frequently associated with mental health and substance use disorders—prompting the majority of disability awards.
That same pattern was playing out in the Lee County coalfields, where some parents coaxed their children’s doctors toward ADHD diagnoses, knowing that such behavioral problems could help make them eligible for Social Security disability when they became adults. “Ritalin is a pipeline to disability here,” one Lee County health care manager told me, describing the federal program as a coping mechanism for poverty and workplace uncertainties.
A hospital administrator I know from nearby eastern Kentucky recalled a Drug Abuse Resistance Education officer asking her high school classmates what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“A drawer,” one young man said.
“You mean an artist?”
“No, a draw-er.”
Someone who draws disability checks. It was the only avenue he could imagine for himself, the only way to get himself and his family fed. Well over half of Lee County’s working-age men—a staggering 57.26 percent—didn’t work. (The trend line was somewhat better among women, around 44 percent.)
If OxyContin was the new moonshine in rural America, disability was the new factory work. By 2016, for every unemployed American man between the ages of twenty-two and fifty-five, an additional three were neither working nor looking for work. Having dropped out of the workforce entirely, they had numerically vanished from the kind of monthly jobs reports touted by politicians and reporters.
Many turned up instead in disability statistics, which were largely ignored in headline-grabbing economic reports. Disability claims nearly doubled from 1996 to 2015. The federal government spent an estimated $192 billion on disability payments in 2017 alone, more than the combined total for food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies, and unemployment assistance.
For people who have not ventured recently into rural America, the jaw-dropping and visible decline of work comes as a shocker, an outgrowth of the nation’s widening political and cultural divide. Before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, that disconnect was maintained by a national media that paid little attention to rural, predominantly white places like St. Charles or Bassett, where the country’s much-hailed economic recovery had definitely not trickled down.