After Ashlyn went to jail, “I whacked four more,” Bassford said of subsequent dealers, all intertwined with Ashlyn’s and Cotto’s networks.
But the demand for heroin persisted, predicated on the evangelical model of users recruiting new users, and Bassford’s whacks could not keep pace. “We’ll score a huge drug bust that we’ve been working on for maybe a year, and all that does is create a vacuum in the market that lasts maybe five to seven days,” said Isaac Van Patten, a Radford University criminologist and data analyst for Roanoke city police. “And because the amounts of money involved are so vast, we’re not going to stamp it out.
“We don’t enjoy the cooperation of the supplier nations,” Van Patten explained, referring to drug-cartel production in western Mexico, South America, and Afghanistan, with profits estimated at more than $300 billion a year. “Their attitude is: ‘Tell your people who are wanting to consume our product, we’re going to supply it.’”
While Roanoke’s quietest heroin users were privileged and upper-middle-class—Van Patten called them the café crowd—it didn’t take long before suburban users like Ashlyn were casting their lot with former OxyContin addicts from the working-class Southeast who were already tapped into illicit networks, he said. “In the suburbs, heroin started out as a trendy drug that people believed they could control. But the rich kids spiraled right down with everybody else and then, suddenly, you couldn’t tell between the two.”
The rich kids were crashing alongside the poor kids on friends’ couches (the lucky ones, anyway), all of them cowering before the morphine molecule and beholden to its spell. Fifteen years earlier, Art Van Zee had predicted that OxyContin would eventually be recalled—but not until rich kids in the suburbs were dying from it. Now they were, and that pained him equally, he told me. “I was absolutely dead wrong.”
*
I thought of Tess Henry, the young mom I met in late 2015. The daughter of a local surgeon and a hospital nurse (they divorced when she was ten), Tess had grown up in multiple homes—one in the nicest section of Roanoke, with mountain-biking trails and the Blue Ridge Parkway abutting her backyard, the other on secluded Bald Head Island, North Carolina, accessible only via ferry.
Tess was a high school track and basketball standout, an honor-roll kid who would go on to study French at Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina–Asheville, though she didn’t complete a degree. Among the things she loved to do before she fell into a raging, $200-a-day heroin habit were writing poetry, painting, reading, and singing to her dog, a black rescue mutt named Koda. (The two were particularly happy when Tess belted out the words to Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” in the car.) Her favorite author in the world was David Sedaris; she’d run into him once in a local coffee shop after a reading, she told me, and he was so, soooo unbelievably nice.
Of Patricia Mehrmann’s four kids, Tess was the quietest, the one who voluntarily walked the dogs with her on the beach. Patricia emailed me a beach picture of the family Labrador, Charlie, and a ten-year-old Tess, all freckles and a toothy smile, with both arms wrapped around the dog. They liked to head out early at low tide to look for beach treasures. “She was the queen sand-dollar finder,” Patricia said.
But Tess struggled with anxiety from a young age, her relatives told me, recalling a panic attack she had as a young teenager on the way home to Roanoke from the beach. (“She thought she was dying,” Patricia remembered. “She was throwing up and calling me from the back seat of the car.”) At her private Catholic primary school, where students wore blue and khaki uniforms, Tess was stressed that her shoes weren’t right.
Tess was twenty-six when we met, a waitress-turned-heroin-addict. With a ruddy complexion and auburn hair, she wore leggings with long sweaters and liked to apply makeup cat-eye style, at the edges of her eyes, which were luminous and shifted color from brown to green depending on the light. She had consorted with most of the Hidden Valley crowd mentioned in this book, working not as a runner or mule but as a lower-level “middleman,” as she called herself. She did worse than that, too.
*
Perhaps she was genetically predisposed to addiction, her mom theorized; there were alcoholic relatives on both sides of the family. Tess’s older sister had been in recovery for five-plus years and was a devoted member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Perhaps, during Tess’s college experimentation phase, it was the twenty-five Lortab pills a friend gave her, left over from a wisdom-tooth extraction, that set her up for the ultimate fall. Tess knew only that her daily compulsion for opioids began in 2012, the same way four out of five heroin addicts come to the drugs: through prescribed opioids. For Tess, a routine visit to an urgent-care center for bronchitis ended with two thirty-day opioid prescriptions, one for cough syrup with codeine and the other for hydrocodone for sore-throat pain.
“When I ran out, I started looking for them on my own, through dealers,” first through the drug-dealing boyfriend of a fellow waitress at the restaurant where they worked, Tess said. Asked how she had known what to do, she told me she Googled it. “Because I was sick. Jittery. Diarrhea. All of it. I looked up my symptoms and what I’d been taking, and I realized, holy crap, I’m probably addicted.”
She could get anything she wanted from her dealer. In the beginning, she snorted five pills a day, usually Dilaudid, Roxicodone, Lortab, or Opana. Then, several months into the routine, almost overnight, the pill supply dried up. Tess blamed it on the DEA’s reclassification of hydrocodone-based drugs into a more restrictive category. “That made it harder for my dealer to get pills,” she said.
In October 2014, hydrocodone-based painkillers such as Vicodin and Lortab were changed from Schedule III drugs to Schedule II, the same category as OxyContin. Regulations now limited doctors to prescription intervals of thirty days or less, with no refills permitted, and patients who needed more had to visit their doctors for a new prescription, as opposed to having it automatically called in to a pharmacy. Before the rule took effect, patients could have their pills refilled automatically as many as five times, covering up to six months—one reason narcotic prescriptions quadrupled from 1999 to 2010, and so did deaths.
The so-called upscheduling had been controversial, with public opinion weighing in pro (52 percent) and con (41). Chronic-pain patients complained loudly about the added cost and inconvenience. “Just because the DEA cannot figure out how to control the illegal use of these drugs should not be a reason to penalize millions of responsible individuals in serious pain,” one critic wrote in a published letter to pharmacist Joe Graedon, The People’s Pharmacy columnist.
On a website set up by the DEA for public feedback, several patients warned that rescheduling the drugs would limit their availability and drive people to street drugs—particularly heroin.
*
Tess’s dealer adapted swiftly to the switch. “He said, here, try this—it’s cheaper and a lot easier to get,” she told me. Tess took her first snort of the light brown powder, same as she’d done with the crushed-up pills. He was a serious dealer, she said, an African American who sold the stuff but was strict about never using himself. “Not to sound racist or anything, but typically black opiate dealers do not use heroin. Good dealers don’t use what they sell because they know they would just use it all,” she said.