It is now the leading cause: Josh Katz, “Fentanyl Overtakes Heroin as Leading Cause of U.S. Drug Deaths,” Global NAIJA News, Sept. 3, 2017.
Kristi Fernandez and I stood: Author interview, Kristi Fernandez, May 23, 2016.
When a new drug sweeps the country: Author interview, historian David Courtwright; the advent of the opioid epidemic was masterfully chronicled for the first time in Paul Tough, “The Alchemy of OxyContin,” New York Times Magazine, July 29, 2001.
the German elixir peddlers at Bayer: Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 69; David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47; Courtwright, “Preventing and Treating Narcotic Addiction—A Century of Federal Drug Control,” New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 26, 2015. Per capita consumption of opiates tripled in the 1870s and 1880s.
CHAPTER ONE. THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA
Interviews: Lt. Richard Stallard, Nancy D. Campbell, Dr. John Burton, Dr. David Davis
young parents can die of heroin overdose one day: Kristine Phillips, “A Young Couple Died of Overdose, Police Say. Their Baby Died of Starvation Days Later,” Washington Post, Dec. 25, 2016. The deaths occurred in the Kernville neighborhood of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, sixty miles east of Pittsburgh.
“Half a million people are dead”: Lenny Bernstein and Joel Achenbach, “A Group of Middle-Aged Whites in the U.S. Is Dying at a Startling Rate,” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2015.
“diseases of despair”: That wording became a shorthand for Case and Deaton’s work in the wake of a subsequent study by the pair, published in March 2017, according to Joel Achenbach and Dan Keating, “New Research Identifies a ‘Sea of Despair’ Among White, Working-Class Americans,” Washington Post, March 23, 2017.The language is also used in a follow-up story, Jeff Guo, “The Disease Killing White Americans Goes Way Deeper Than Opioids,” Washington Post, March 24, 2017.
Kaiser Family Foundation poll: Bianca DiJulio, Jamie Firth, Liz Hamel, and Mollyann Brodie, “Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: November 2015,” http://kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-november-2015/.
Nationwide, the difference in life expectancy: Steven Rattner, “2016 in Charts. (And Can Trump Deliver in 2017?),” New York Times, Jan. 3, 2017.
in Appalachia, those disparities are even starker: A 65 percent higher overdose mortality rate in Appalachia: Michael Meit et al., “Appalachian Diseases of Despair,” prepared for the Appalachian Regional Commission, Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis, August 2017.
people hadn’t yet begun locking: The early history of the modern-day epidemic shows that some of the largest concentrations of overdose deaths were in Appalachia, the Southwest, and New England, according to Lauren M. Rossen et al., “Drug Poisoning Mortality: United States, 2002–2014,” National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Aug. 25, 2016.
Stallard was sitting in his patrol car: Author interview, Big Stone Gap police lieutenant Richard Stallard (now retired), April 29, 2016.
snorters overcame their aversion to needles: Paul Tough, “The Alchemy of OxyContin,” New York Times Magazine, July 29, 2001.
“Delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin”: Attachment B to Plea Agreement, United States v. The Purdue Frederick Company, Inc., and Michael Friedman, Howard R. Udell, and Paul D. Goldenheim, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Abingdon Division, from lawsuit’s “Agreed Statement of Facts” outlining the company’s original claims, 6; last modified May 8, 2007.
The company was virtually unheard of: Michael Moore, “Lodi Plant Owners Known for Wealth, Philanthrophy,” Hackensack Record (NJ), April 27, 1995.
As its patent was set to expire: Stacy Wong, “Thrust Under Microscope, Stamford Drug Company’s Low Profile Shattered by Controversy Over Abuse of Painkiller OxyContin,” Hartford Courant, Sept. 2, 2001.
launched in the nation’s best-known corporate tax haven: Leslie Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven,” New York Times, June 30, 2012. Because corporations can lower their taxes by shifting royalties and other revenues to holding companies in Delaware, where they are not taxed, the state is particularly appealing to shell companies.
“If you take the medicine”: Barry Meier, Pain Killer: A “Wonder” Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death (New York: Rodale Press, 2003), 43.
“exquisitely rare”: Ibid., 190.
at the end of Alexander Hamilton’s ill-fated duel: John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004; originally published in 1959), 574. Hamilton recovered from a 1793 bout of yellow fever after taking laudanum, 380.
one of Boston’s leading merchants: Opium money made by Thomas S. Perkins helped spawn the Industrial Revolution, according to Martha Bebinger, “How Profits from Opium Shaped Nineteenth-Century Boston,” WBUR, July 31, 2017.
the opioid-addicted in China had long referred to as “yen”: Thomas Nordegren, The A–Z Encyclopedia of Alcohol and Drug Abuse (Parkland, FL: Brown Walker, 2002), 691. “Yen” refers both to restless sleep during withdrawal and to the craving for drugs.
(What modern-day addicted users): William S. Burroughs, Junkie (New York: Ace Books, 1953), 155.
“I consider it my duty”: Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 69.
it became standard practice: Soldier’s disease as defined in Gerald Starkey, “The Use and Abuse of Opiates and Amphetamines,” in Patrick Healy and James Manak, eds., Drug Dependence and Abuse Resource Book (Chicago: National District Attorneys Association, 1971), 482–84. While Starkey puts the number of addicted veterans at 400,000, some modern-day historians believe the figure is lower and are more likely to cite Horace Day’s 1868 Opium Habit, which estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 Americans were addicted, as also described in Dillon J. Carroll, “Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction in the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Civil War Era, Nov. 22, 2016. David F. Musto puts the 1900 figure at 250,000 in The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5.
The addiction was particularly severe: Carroll, “Civil War Veterans.”
“Since the close of the war”: “Opium and Its Consumers,” New York Tribune, July 10, 1877.
“I know persons”: Letter by Dr. W. G. Rogers, Daily Dispatch (Richmond, VA), Jan. 25, 1884.
It was a safe family drug: David F. Musto, ed., One Hundred Years of Heroin (Westport, CT: Auburn House, 2002), 4.
it also seemed to strengthen respiration: Ibid.
Free samples were mailed: David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 91, 231.
“almost criminal”: “Women Victims of Morphine; Physicians Discuss the Danger in the Use of the Drug,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1895.
By 1900, more than 250,000 Americans: Musto, The American Disease, 5.
for eight years you could buy heroin: Some states had regional versions of the Harrison Act before 1914, but that didn’t prevent a person from going the mail-order route, according to historian Nancy D. Campbell; author interview, Oct. 25, 2017.