An annual $35 billion lie—according to a New York Times exposé of a recovery industry it found to be unevenly regulated, rapacious, and largely abstinence-focused when multiple studies show outpatient MAT is the best way to prevent overdose deaths. “I’m afraid we don’t have good data on outcomes from residential programs,” said John Kelly, the Harvard researcher. While research supports users remaining in their home environments on outpatient MAT, desperate families continue to grasp for “cures” offered by companies marketing abstinence-only rehabs. “Part of it is, when you spend that much money, you think it’s going to work,” Cheri Hartman said. “But it is killing people for that myth to be out there—that the only true cure is abstinence.”
*
I hoped the stories of Ronnie Jones and his victims would illuminate the ruts in both a criminal justice system that pursues a punishment-fits-all plan when the truth is much more complicated and a strained medical system that overtreats people with painkillers until the moment addiction sets in—and health care scarcity becomes the rule.
I hoped, too, that my interview with Jones would help answer Kristi Fernandez’s questions about what led to her son Jesse’s premature death. Was Ronnie Jones really the monster that law enforcement officials made him out to be? Had the statewide corrections behemoth that returns two thousand ex-offenders a year to Virginia’s cities, counties, and towns played a role in his revolving door of failures?
I had come to interview Ronnie Jones expecting I would have two hours, no recording devices allowed. On the day of our meeting, though, the visit stretched from morning into late afternoon, with the prison handler monitoring our visit from the other side of a glass wall and inexplicably allowing us to talk for more than six hours.
I had the better part of a day to try to discern how a sleepy agricultural county nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with covered bridges and lovingly preserved two-hundred-year-old log homes, had gone from having a handful of heroin users to hundreds in a few short months, and how much Ronnie Jones was to blame for it.
*
Understandably guarded at first, Ronnie, thirty-nine, was gentlemanly and polite throughout the visit. During the two years he’d spent there, he said, he spent his time working out, studying Arabic and Swahili, and reading the works of Guy Johnson, Eric Jerome Dickey, and Maya Angelou. On my way to the prison, I’d been listening to the audiobook of Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow, I told him, the seminal book on mass incarceration that likens the War on Drugs to a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow.
“I’ve read The New Jim Crow twice,” Ronnie said. He’d also read lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s majestic Just Mercy, a memoir about his work against the racial bias and economic inequities inherent in the criminal justice system, which included efforts on behalf of falsely accused death row inmates. “It had me crying when I read it,” he said. These books we had both read challenged the tough-on-crime government narrative of the past forty years, one that fostered the shift in public spending from health and welfare programs to a massive system of incarceration, with a fivefold increase in imprisonment and corrections spending that soared from $6.9 billion in 1980 to $80 billion today.
Whereas Bill Metcalf, the ATF agent largely responsible for Jones’s twenty-three-year prison sentence, took inspiration for his life’s work from the image of the brain frying like an egg and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” slogan, Alexander and Stevenson saw fearmongering and institutional racism in mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes sentencing laws, the abolishment of parole, and “stop and frisk” policing.
This was Ronnie’s third time in prison. He already knew that one in three black men was destined to end up incarcerated, only to find himself branded as a felon and second-class citizen the moment he got out, blocked from the mainstream economy and propelled into a dystopian loop of jail, joblessness, and back to jail. He knew that drug-involved offenders, who represent half the incarcerated population, had a recidivism rate of 75 percent. His own story was a case in point.
“We can’t arrest our way out of this problem,” I’d heard again and again, from everyone from police chiefs to public health providers. But that sentiment seemed to apply only to the mostly white group of opioid users who were dealing or committing property crimes to stave off dopesickness—not to people like Ronnie, in prison for armed heroin distribution, or to the majority of other black and brown people arrested for selling the drugs, even though they were statistically less likely to use or to deal. (Three-quarters of federal drug offenders are black or Hispanic while 57 percent of state-imprisoned drug offenders are people of color.)
Why had blacks failed to become ensnared in opioid addiction? That question was addressed in 2014 data issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Doctors didn’t trust people of color not to abuse opioids, so they prescribed them painkillers at far lower rates than they did whites. “It’s a case where racial stereotyping actually seems to be having a protective effect,” marveled researcher Dr. Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University. Put another way: By 2014, while young whites were dying of overdose at a rate three times higher than they did in 2002, the death rate for people of color was relatively unchanged.
If, as Shannon Monnat had proposed, the hollowing out of the predominantly white working class was the kindling in the heroin epidemic, and the mounds of opioid pills in America’s communal medicine chest was the spark, I was beginning to wonder whether the fragile transition of ten thousand prisoners a week from state and federal prisons into U.S. communities fanned the flames of the fire.
At the same time that Ronnie and I were speaking, the city of Winchester was launching the region’s first drug court just a half hour north of the heart of Ronnie’s Woodstock heroin ring. It was designed not only to connect offenders to treatment, including MAT, but also to help them access free housing and taxi vouchers to get to work (a serious barrier in rural areas), the latter paid for by grants from the local Rotary Club.
While the government’s response to the opioid crisis had been molasses-slow, mired in bureaucracy, funding woes, and slow-to-close treatment gaps, here was an example of volunteers stepping in to patch up the holes. Winchester was becoming a magnet for people in recovery across the state, including ex-offenders who came for treatment and ended up staying because of its multitude of halfway houses—fourteen in a city of just twenty-seven thousand people—and of newly announced jobs.
Amazon was soon to open a warehouse and distribution center in the county, and Procter and Gamble was building a Bounce fabric-softener factory twenty minutes north. The fastest-growing church in town was led by an ex-offender and opioid addict, a charismatic pastor who held Sunday services at the downtown mall—in a bar.
What if Winchester’s Rotarians and drug-court champions had been around to assist Ronnie Jones when he got out of prison, instead of one probation officer responsible for keeping up with 104 ex-offenders on her rolls?
“Right away they run into issues of having a paycheck that doesn’t cover rent, utilities, and food, not to mention their court fines and child-support arrears—and that’s when the issues really start,” said Ronnie’s probation officer, who asked not to be named because she wasn’t authorized to speak. “That’s usually when they commit new crimes.” In 2016, the Woodstock office had two probation officers tasked with doing monthly check-ins, field visits, and drug screening for 204 people, though an additional officer was scheduled to join the team.