With the legalization of marijuana in a growing number of states, drug cartels were champing at the bit to meet the demand for heroin, a market they needed to grow. “They were looking at a thirty to forty percent reduction in profits because of legalization,” explained Joe Crowder, a Virginia state police special agent and part of the federally funded High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program that designated Roanoke a heroin hot spot in 2014. “Between the pill epidemic and the less liberal prescribing of pain meds, cartel leaders said, ‘Guess what’s purer, cheaper, and we can make it all day long?’”
Some dealers encouraged underlings to “hot pack” their product, giving superhigh potencies to new users to hook them quicker. Once the user is hooked, the product gets titrated back, forcing the person to buy more.
*
Tess said she didn’t consider herself a true addict until six months after she started snorting heroin, when she began injecting it. After three shots, though, she knew she’d never return to snorting. She showed me the scars inside her right elbow; right-handed, she learned to use her left hand to mainline the drugs into her right arm because that vein was usually a sure hit.
For a while she was able to keep waitressing at a trendy, upmarket bistro featured in the likes of Southern Living and Garden & Gun. She wore long sleeves to hide her track marks and was still able, if she concentrated hard, to remember orders without writing them down.
Around this time, a family friend told her mother, “Your daughter’s an opiate addict,” and Patricia Mehrmann had a reaction not unlike that of many other parents faced with the same accusation: She fumed, incredulous. After all, Tess never missed a day of work. “She did everything she was supposed to do,” Patricia said. We were sitting in her comfortable sunroom, surrounded by woods. Patricia was way past denying it now: She’d spent the last six months navigating treatment hurdles, and worse.
“I worked just to use, and I used just so I could work,” Tess explained. “There was no in between.” But that phase was brief, and neither Tess nor her mom had any idea what was coming next. Or that the molecule had another even higher card to play.
No matter how low Tess got, it seemed there was always a deeper and fresher hell awaiting her.
*
The addiction would out Tess eventually, as it always does. Even though she was earning $800 a week at the restaurant, even though she’d started middlemanning—recruiting and selling to new users in exchange for her cut of the drugs—she needed more money because she required ever-larger quantities of heroin to keep from feeling shaky and dopesick. She was arrested twice early on—once when officers picked her up for being drunk in public downtown and found an unprescribed OxyContin in her pocket, and again when police caught her stealing gift cards from a store. The first charge was pleaded down from a felony to a misdemeanor, and Tess was sentenced to a year’s probation and a weekend in jail. The second was treated purely as a theft. “I begged her public defender: ‘This is not what it looks like; send her to drug court!’” remembered her father, Alan Henry, from whom Tess was sometimes estranged.
On May 15, 2015, an employee manning the security cameras at a Roanoke Lowe’s alerted police to Tess. The camera caught her palming a copper plumbing implement and stuffing it into her purse. She’d done it before: stolen an item from one Lowe’s, then returned it to another Lowe’s, which would issue her a gift card for the value (since she lacked a receipt). But this time they caught her before she left the store.
“I was already in withdrawal at the time” of her arrest, she said.
At the Roanoke city jail that night, with every pore on her body aching and every muscle spasming, a female jailer greeted her with a tiny cup.
“Here, take this,” the jailer instructed. The woman handed Tess the medicine, which had been ordered as a result of a routine urine screen.
Inside the cup was a low dose of Tylenol with the opioid codeine. It was designed to keep the fetus growing inside Tess from going into sudden, potentially fatal opioid withdrawal. Twenty-five and five foot seven, Tess was down to 120 pounds. She hadn’t had a regular period in two years. She had no idea she was at the end of her second trimester of pregnancy.
At least in jail, for the immediate future, she and the baby were safe.
*
Six weeks later, the region’s new HIDTA task force issued a warning about a spike in opioid-overdose incidents. Between May 1 and June 23, 2015, the local drug task force would investigate eleven overdose calls, four of them fatal. The culprit was fentanyl, once a popularly diverted opioid prescribed in patch form for advanced-cancer patients that was now being illicitly imported from China and mixed with heroin or manufactured into pills. (Some arrived from China via Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Canada.)
A synthetic opioid considered twenty-five to fifty times stronger than heroin, mail-order fentanyl had been arriving direct to residences across the United States, and so were the pill presses that local dealers used to turn the powder into pills. One quarter-ton press arrived in Southern California inside a package labeled hole puncher. Cartel lieutenants were setting up clandestine fentanyl labs across America, mixing the powder with heroin to increase the high, in products stamped with names like China Girl, Goodfella, Jackpot, and Cash. “Some of the companies shipping this stuff from China will send you a free replacement package if it gets interdicted on the way to your home,” a prevention worker in Baltimore told me.
News that people were dying from fentanyl-laced heroin didn’t intimidate heroin addicts, according to several I interviewed. On the contrary, the lure of an even stronger high drew them to it more.
Later that year and again in 2017, China began banning, at the request of the DEA, the manufacture of several fentanyl analogs, which had previously been unregulated. But each time a derivative was banned, a DEA spokesman conceded, new spin-offs emerged from underground Chinese labs, some more potent than the originals. Law enforcement interdiction of the packages is tricky, because it’s hard to tell whether the shippers are illicit labs labeling the envelopes “research chemicals,” complete with phony return addresses, or legitimate companies providing the powder for pharmaceutical research.
Back in 2015, Roanoke police chief Chris Perkins, forty-six, knew immediately fentanyl was going to be a game changer. It meant more teenagers would be drawn to the ever-potent blends, able to get high simply by snorting the drug and avoiding the stigma new users have about injecting and, later, the telltale track marks. It meant some would buy counterfeit pills that were sold to them as Xanax or oxycodone but were actually fentanyl.
In his earliest days of working undercover drugs, Perkins had gone by the name Woody Call and wore the classic Serpico look, with a goatee and longish dark hair. It was the mid-1990s, when heroin dealers used to “step on,” or cut, their product with baby powder. He remembers finding a pair of Radford University coeds at one bust, naked on a couch in a Roanoke drug house, enveloped in a heroin fog. They’d exchanged sex for the drug, injecting it between their toes so their friends and professors wouldn’t know. Stunned, Perkins remembers calling their parents in the Washington suburbs and saying, “I can’t tell you this over the phone. You just need to come.”
But now the cut had switched from baby powder to fentanyl, from mild to often lethal. “The market is so saturated, I can’t say it enough: There is so much heroin out there,” sold not only by former crack dealers eager to diversify their product but also by subordinates, or subdealers, Perkins said. So much that Roanoke police seized 560 grams of the stuff in 2015 alone—the equivalent of 18,666 doses or shots.