by Beth Macy
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.
Two years before Colton’s death, a family friend in Fredericksburg, Virginia, lost his son to a heroin overdose, and Drenna remembered thinking, “Why can’t you control your kid?” She apologized, later, for having judged. She had monitored Colton’s Adderall when she learned he was abusing it at age seventeen. She’d grounded him soon after, when she found pot hidden in a briefcase under his bed. She’d sent him to a twenty-eight-day rehab at nineteen after he progressed to pills.
“At first you’re just so embarrassed,” Drenna said. “You think you’re doing right as a parent, but then these drugs take over their life, and nobody talks about it because it’s this dark, hidden secret.”
At the funeral-home visitation, Drenna had Colton presented in an open casket, wearing a flannel shirt she’d just bought him from Kohl’s, pants, hat, and his favorite boots, the ones he wore four-wheeling. His hands were arranged so they clutched a necklace he’d recently borrowed from his older brother, a silver fish medallion with the inscription WWJD.
She remembered her handsome bearded boy borrowing it from his brother’s nightstand, telling her, “I may not be as good-looking as Kevin, but I do pretty well with the girls.” And they both laughed.
She would remember that moment every day for the rest of her life—especially when she stopped by Burger King on his birthday to order his favorite meal (a cheeseburger with fries and sweet tea), and when she poured dressing on her salad (“He’d use ranch, and he’d think the bottle had a small hole when it didn’t, and invariably it’d go all over the place”).
“I wanted his friends to see this person they knew who was no longer here. This was the star athlete, the kid who stood up to bullies. Colton was everybody’s protector, everybody’s friend. He had a good home life. He really had it all,” she recalled, tearing up.
“They think they’re invincible.”
Three months after Spencer left for prison and two years after Scott Roth’s death, the Bankses used their nineteen-year-old son’s funeral to send a message to his opioid-addicted friends and their parents.
Though Christopher Waldrop was away at rehab and not allowed to come home, Jamie made a point of sitting next to one of his high school friends at the service, in an increasingly familiar role.
She and a handful of other local moms were preparing to out themselves and their families, understanding, finally, that survival had to trump shame. Jamie pledged to help her son’s friend find a bed at a treatment facility the moment he was ready to go. “His parents were in total denial,” she said.
She would tell Christopher later how Drenna Banks stood at her son’s funeral, her voice quavering, and begged her audience to let Colton’s death be the last:
“For the longest time, I didn’t know what God wanted me to do, but now I know,” she told the mourners, chucking her prepared remarks in favor of an impromptu call for treatment. “There are so many families struggling with the same thing Colton has been struggling with. It’s insidious, and it’s evil, and it’s not just pot.…And I know there’s a social stigma attached to this, but don’t hide. Don’t hide from it.
“I know there are at least three other boys here that I know Colton wants me to help. And you know who you are.…I know now that I’m supposed to be here for you boys, and we’re gonna make it through.”
The following Mother’s Day, Jamie called Drenna and asked her to come over because her husband was out of the country, and she didn’t know what else to do. Christopher was close to relapsing, Jamie suspected, if he hadn’t already. He was at home visiting her, having checked himself out of an Asheville, North Carolina, aftercare program—against his counselor’s advice. After four months of sobriety, “I was tired of all the rules,” Christopher told me later. “I wanted to drink again.”
Jamie begged Drenna to talk some sense into her son. And Drenna tried, telling him that Colton would not want him to be using again; that it wasn’t fair for his mom to have to wonder every second of every day if she would be going to his funeral as she did Colton’s. He insisted that he wasn’t using heroin and that he hoped, eventually, to make Colton proud.
But the drinking would lead to poor choices, as it usually did, and before long the usual signs presented themselves in the form of stolen checks and pawned laptops; in Christopher continuing to lie through his teeth to his mom, over the phone from Asheville, that he was not doing drugs.
Drenna advised Jamie to drive the four hours to her son’s apartment and show up on hi
s doorstep, unannounced. “You’ve got to go down there,” she implored her friend. “You’ve got to go look at him and pull up his sleeves!”
Jamie arrived at her son’s apartment to find cases of beer and a bong in the middle of the living room.
“Hand me your phone,” she said.
Her stomach sank the moment she clicked on his text log and found scores of messages to and from drug dealers. There was no need to pull up Christopher’s sleeves—the needles and bags of heroin were right there near the beer, tucked into his shoes.
“I was like, shit, here we go again,” Christopher remembered.
What he needed, said his counselor, whom Jamie had called in for advice, was “another fucking spiritual experience, and I have the perfect place”: an abstinence-based rehab in the Montana wilderness.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Christopher. “I hate the wilderness.”
“Then you can join the Asheville transient society,” the counselor said.
Christopher pleaded for help from his mom. Surely she could not abide him becoming homeless.
But Jamie said she would no longer help Christopher finance an apartment, a car, a cellphone, or even food. “We’re not enabling you anymore,” she said.
Instead, she spent a week in an Asheville hotel room with her dopesick son as he detoxed, toggling between a hot shower and the toilet, prepping for his return to rehab.
A day into the detox, Christopher decided he was ready for another fucking spiritual experience. He was twenty years old.
“I felt terrible,” he remembered. “From Colton dying, and I knew I’d hurt my family a ton.” He was tired of trawling for purses in mall parking lots when most of the car doors were locked. “I was not having enough money to get high, I’d been stealing too much, and I hated it. This time, I wanted it [sobriety] for myself.”
As of this writing, Christopher has remained sober four years. At twenty-four, he’s back in college, this time in Dallas, the city where he landed after Montana to live in a sober house for young men transitioning from rehab to recovery. Offered a drink on his twenty-first birthday, Christopher told a waitress, “I’m allergic to alcohol.”
He was spending a lot of time “giving back” to the recovery community, mentoring young people who are newly sober, helping them work the twelve steps—and worrying about his mom as she increasingly devoted herself to helping other addicted people access treatment, calling rehabs, picking them up off the streets, and taking them to homeless shelters. His surgeon dad has even been known to give Jamie’s cellphone number out to addicted patients he meets in the ER.
“There’s a lot of emotional investment in it for her, but she’s not an addict and doesn’t totally understand, still, that some of the people she deals with are going to die. And the small percentage of people who do end up getting better may end up” relapsing, Christopher said, especially those who can’t afford multiple rehabs and aftercare.
How many addicts, after all, have moms who can afford not just to send their dopesick son to a second $30,000 rehab but also to accompany him on his flight to Montana so he won’t, at the last minute, back out?
Christopher knows he’s in a rarefied position: Fewer than one-quarter of heroin addicts who receive abstinence-only counseling and support remain clean two or more years. The recovery rate is higher, roughly 40 to 60 percent, among those who get counseling, support group, and medication-assisted treatment such as methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone.
“We know from other countries that when people stick with treatment, outcomes can be even better than fifty percent,” Lembke, the addiction specialist, told me. But most people in the United States don’t have access to good opioid-addiction treatment, she said, acknowledging the plethora of cash-only MAT clinics that resemble pill-mill pain clinics as well as rehabs that remain staunchly anti-MAT.
All told, Christopher had lost four close friends to opioid overdose, including Colton Banks and Scott Roth. For Brian, the number was also four.
None of the recovering users I interviewed had been in the military, but they tallied their losses with the sorrowful stoicism of veterans who’d been to war.
Near the tail end of Spencer Mumpower’s prison sentence, he had lost twelve friends, and five others were now in prison or jail. “He’s had very few friends get clean, either through going to rehab or jail, but the ones who didn’t are either dead, or they have parents who enable them, and they continue to do drugs,” Ginger Mumpower said. “Most of his friends have never seen jail; they either talk their way out, or their parents buy their way out.”
When Colton Banks died, in 2012, for every one opioid-overdose death, there were 130 opioid-dependent Americans who were still out there, still using the drugs.
George’s Chicken, Edinburg, Virginia
Chapter Seven
FUBI
In the picturesque Shenandoah Valley town of Woodstock, more than two hours north of Roanoke, bulk heroin cut in a Harlem lab had just made its way down I-81. It was the last thing Shenandoah County sergeant Brent Lutz, a Woodstock native, would have expected to find himself doing: stalking a major heroin dealer. But here he was, at all hours of the day and night, clutching a pair of binoculars while crouched in the upstairs bedroom of his cousin’s house a few miles outside of town. He’d spent so much time there in recent days that the mile-wide stench of chicken entrails coming from George’s Chicken across the road no longer bothered him.
Lutz was tracking the movements of Charles Smith and Pete Butler, suspected dealers in a newly arrived drug ring. Butler lived in a marigold-colored boardinghouse called Alma’s, full of chicken-processing-plant employees, while Smith lived in a trailer park with his girlfriend behind the giant plant. Confidential informants had told Lutz that the men, former drug offenders who’d landed in town a year earlier to work at the plant via the Virginia prison system’s work-release program, were responsible for the recent surge in heroin-related crime in Shenandoah County. Not only did Smith and Butler have dozens of people working under them, many of them addicted, they also had a boss.
Over the next year, the story of that boss and his underlings would allow the young sergeant and his peers to pull the curtain back on the inner workings of a large-scale heroin ring for the first time.
Across the nation, police chiefs and sheriffs were beginning to lament, “We can’t arrest our way out of this epidemic.” That sentiment illuminated the folly of the decades-long War on Drugs, in which drug users are arrested four times more often than those who sell the drugs.
Sergeant Lutz’s government-financed odyssey would also illustrate just how expensive, difficult, and time-consuming enforcement strategies are—with $7.6 billion spent nationwide combating opioid-related crime in 2013 alone—compared with treating the addicted people who drive the demand.
It was late 2012, and Lutz, thirty, had just returned to his job as lead narcotics investigator from a temporary assignment elsewhere in the sheriff’s department. Before he left, drug arrests in Woodstock, the county seat, were mostly related to black-market opioid pills: Roxicodone, or Roxy; Dilaudid; Percocet; and the like. His mother, a pharmacy assistant in the storied uptown drugstore with turquoise soda fountain counters and a handwritten charge-account ledger like something out of Happy Days, had first warned him about pill abuse more than a decade before, sharing stories of customers who claimed they’d accidentally spilled their prescription down the bathroom sink. The local emergency room was by now accustomed to the classic fake and fraud: a moaning patient claiming kidney stone pain and pleading for Dilaudid, also known as “that one that starts with a D.” Drug-seeking behavior was so common that it had spawned an Onion-style medical parody on a website called GomerBlog, which punchy health care workers across the state had gleefully called to my attention: “To kick off their new labeling, [the Dilaudid-making] company hopes to change the pain scale from a 0–10 to Tylenol-to–That One That Starts with a D,” the satirist wrote. (“You go cra
zy if you can’t laugh every now and then,” a nurse-practitioner told me.)
Farther out, in the foothills of the George Washington National Forest, people were still making methamphetamine, Lutz knew. In 2008, he had worked a notorious case, arresting some twenty locals and diversion-program inmates for smuggling meth-making materials out of George’s Chicken via an elaborate pulley system dangling from the plant’s roof.
Lutz thought he had seen everything at George’s Chicken, a plant manned by dislocated factory workers, young locals who lived just north of the poverty line, immigrants who’d managed to land a work visa (or a passable version of one), and an increasing number of workers whom Lutz referred to simply as “diversion,” as in: “Most of the trouble we get around here is from diversion.” A Virginia Department of Corrections initiative, the program aims to divert nonviolent felons from prison to employment, and to help them gain work experience that will ease the transition back to their communities after their sentences are complete. Most divertees hail from the urban centers of Roanoke, Richmond, and the Tidewater region, or outside Washington.
Lutz had met with managers at George’s Chicken numerous times. “We’re out there once a week at least—fights, drug-related stuff, overdoses in the company parking lot,” the sergeant said. “You ask them if they drug-test, and they say they do, but I doubt they watch ’em, so they can still bring in [clean] urine. As long as they got people coming and going to work, they don’t care.”
