His parents noticed he was moodier than usual and worried about his weight loss; he’d dropped from 150 to 125 pounds. They asked him if he was anorexic.
A counselor he was seeing for anxiety set up an intervention of sorts in his office, inviting Brian’s parents to attend and beginning with “Brian wants to tell you about a problem he’s having.”
By then he was shooting up twenty bags a day, buying them from a host of user-dealers that had once included Spencer and Scott.
“I’m addicted to heroin,” he told his parents.
And while they were relieved to finally know why he’d lost so much weight—and why he sometimes stayed out until 3 or 4 a.m.—they were also gobsmacked.
They sent him to a local hospital to detox, then to intensive outpatient treatment, where he was prescribed the opioid-maintenance drug Suboxone, with mandatory urine screenings, one-on-one counseling, and support group meetings.
Brian was twenty-three years old and beginning to wean off Suboxone when I first interviewed him, in 2012.
“It’s been seven days today” since his last dose of Suboxone, he said. “I have pinprickly skin, and I’m restless. It’s hard to sit still.” Still mourning Scott’s death, he noted that none of his other user-dealer friends, with the exception of Spencer, had been caught.
“The cellphone is the glue that holds it all together for the modern drug user,” Brian told me. “In high school, I snuck out of the house a number of times to meet people at the bottom of the driveway, and my parents had no clue. Aside from taking my cellphone away, my parents also could have looked at my text message logs and gotten a sense of what was going on.”
*
At a Lutheran church on the outskirts of Hidden Valley, two moms of opioid-addicted young men met at a Families Anonymous meeting, where worried parents go for peer support. Not only would their chance meeting have lasting implications for families of the addicted in the region, but their stories would also expose how families operate inside the sizable gaps that have opened up between the two institutions tasked with addressing the opioid epidemic: the criminal justice and health care systems. While shame too often cloaks these gaps in secrecy, some doctors, drug dealers, and pharmaceutical companies continue to profit mightily from them. The addicted work to survive and stave off dopesickness while desperate family members and volunteers work to keep them alive.
Jamie Waldrop was a civic leader, the wife of a prominent surgeon. Drenna Banks and her husband ran a successful insurance agency. Their sons had been friends and used drugs together, crossing paths briefly through friends at North Cross, a private suburban school that Jamie’s son Christopher attended.
“I just knew [Jamie] was this cool blond-haired chick who was making me laugh at a time when I needed to laugh,” Drenna recalled. Jamie had not one but two children who’d become addicted, first to pills, then heroin. She hadn’t realized the depth of their addiction until she found them both passed out in separate incidents in her home—her oldest, breathing but slumped over in a chair from a combo of Xanax and painkillers, his cellphone fallen to the ground; her youngest, passed out on the bathroom floor, heroin needles and blood sprawled around him.
Between the outpatient Suboxone programs (none of which worked, the family said) and multiple residential rehabs and aftercare sober-house programs (two of which, eventually, did), the Waldrops would spend more than $300,000 on treatment—not counting the drug-related legal fees or the thousands in stolen checks and credit-card bills for gift cards, which were traded to dealers for drugs. (A $200 gift card goes for $120 worth of pills, Jamie explained.) “I was a pretty bad robber,” Christopher, her youngest, said.
Jamie and her husband can’t pinpoint the most frenzied moment in their journey. Maybe it was when they were scheduled to attend a medical conference at the Greenbrier, a storied five-star resort, but had to bring their grown sons along because they couldn’t trust them to stay home alone. Before the conference was over, they discovered a sizable drug stash hidden in a potted plant in their room.
Maybe it was when Jamie’s surgeon husband had to drive to the roughest part of the city to pay off one son’s drug-dealer debt. Or maybe it was the daily jewelry shuffle Jamie initiated in the wake of discovering her diamond necklace gone, along with her husband’s Rolex: She’d take what remained of her best jewelry, “the handed-down stuff,” and rotate it between an oatmeal container, the freezer, and the dirty-laundry hamper—the last places her children would look. “We lived like that for years; it was our new normal. Until they go off to rehab, you don’t realize just how dysfunctional your life has become.”
In the beginning, Jamie and Drenna had, like most parents, isolated themselves—until it dawned on them, at the Families Anonymous meeting, that they were living a very similar nightmare. “I stayed away from my other friends because what do you say when people ask you, ‘How are your kids doing?’” Jamie said.
*
Christopher was two weeks into his first residential-treatment stay when word reached him that a good friend had fatally overdosed on 30-milligram oxycodone pills and other narcotics. It was Colton Banks, Drenna’s son.
“It tore me up pretty good,” Christopher remembered. “Colton was the nicest guy ever. You could call him up in the middle of the night and ask him for a ride, and he’d get out of bed and come and get you.”
Christopher recognized the location of his friend’s death immediately. His body was found at the home of a middle-aged man, an opioid addict who’d been prescribed hundreds of the pills from a Roanoke pain clinic three days before. All but twelve of the pills were missing, a police search warrant confirmed, in a painkiller-selling scheme that placed Colton, nineteen, on the campus of Radford University, where he was selling the pills to pay back a drug debt from the day before.
“We got most of our pills from him,” Christopher said of the middle-aged addict. “He’d get four hundred thirties [Roxicodone], then some fifteens [Roxicodone], Xanax, and Klonopin all prescribed to him at once by the same crooked doctor. You can use a lot and still make five thousand dollars a month off that, if not more.”
The weekend of Colton’s death was supposed to be his last hurrah before getting clean. He had an appointment with an addiction specialist lined up for Monday—he’d stuck not one but two Post-it notes on the dashboard of his car reminding him to go.
Colton died at eleven-thirty on the morning of November 4, 2012, All Saints Sunday, while his parents were in church. A few hours later, when a policeman showed up on their stoop to say that Colton had “expired,” they were initially confused. Expired? No, their younger son was dead.
To add insult, no charges were filed against the middle-aged dealer, because it’s impossible to pin blame on a single batch of pills when an autopsy rules “multiple toxicity,” as it did in Colton’s case, the police chief confirmed.
The Bankses fumed, then and now, about that. “I want to go kill the bastard,” Drenna told her husband, but he persuaded her to stop and think about their other son.
And she did, though she sometimes sat outside the man’s house in her car, her gun on the seat next to her, anguishing and hating and praying for her son.
*