Dopesick

by Beth Macy

  Courtney was one of them. She said she ran because she feared her children would be removed by social service workers. (She does not do drugs, she said, and her kids had been asleep in an upstairs bedroom throughout the party and were not exposed.)

  Dennis called 911 and waited for police.

  By the time Lutz arrived—between two and six hours later—rigor mortis had set in. “I think there’s still something they’re not telling me,” Kristi says about why Jesse’s friends waited so long to call 911. “Jesse usually used pills instead of heroin, and I don’t think he’d use alone. I’d feel better knowing that he was not alone when he died.”

  Lutz remembered thinking how strange it was: Here was a fit, burly construction worker, a guy who’d just put in forty hours of work that week, felled to his core by the diabolical drug.

  When a cellphone atop the bathroom vanity rang that morning, Lutz picked it up. It was a counselor, calling Jesse to confirm his Sunday arrival time at the Jacksonville rehab.

  Over the next several weeks, Metcalf pounded Ronnie Jones with questions, trying to get him to reveal his source. But Jones denied being a drug dealer, denied that the confiscated guns and drugs belonged to him. And who the hell was Mack?

  It didn’t help Jones’s case that his gun, recovered from the Dumfries apartment, had Jones’s DNA on it, as did another gun, reported stolen from a car in Woodstock. Or that Metcalf had multiple witnesses claiming that Jones threatened to kill them with it if they didn’t pay off their drug debts.

  Police even recorded phone calls from Jones trying to coordinate drug pickups and sales—from inside the jail.

  “Shit don’t stop,” he told one of his girlfriends.

  He wrote angry letters to people, telling Marie he still loved her but was mad that she’d dimed him to police. Above all, he wanted people to know, he was not a snitch.

  “Arthur, I have been hearing a lot of foul shit lately from people who you have spoke to,” began one of Jones’s letters from jail. “I want to set the record straight…I never told/snitch on you. NEVER.…After that nigga Logan [Rose] gave all that info to the [feds] they still told him he would be charged, and he ran to Puerto Rico with his girl that he met at George’s. Do you see me putting a bad bone out there on you for that shit? Hell no, because I’m going to wait until I see you face to face to ask you about it like a man.…I don’t want nobody fucking up my name or character in these streets or jails. If you got questions just holla at me.”

  Though most of the user-dealers were happy to sing, it was code among the people at Jones’s level to behave as if not only their dignity was at stake but also their lives, which quite possibly they were.

  Not so with dealer Kareem Shaw, who was happy to pull back the curtain on the FUBI ring when the task force arrested him four months after Jesse’s death. Best of all, he led Metcalf to a key piece of information: a face.

  “You saw the video, right?” he asked Metcalf.

  What video?

  An eighty-minute production, Hell Up in East Harlem was a gritty, street-level documentary about a Harlem block plagued by gang violence during the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and ’90s. It was all available on YouTube and so, around minute thirty, was the source of the tsunami of misery that descended on Woodstock a decade after the film was made.

  Seated on a bench for the camera, Mack wore a red hoodie. He bemoaned the fact that death and prison seemed too often to be the only avenues out of the loop of poverty and drugs.

  Appearing on camera had been a rookie mistake for the young, then-low-level dealer, who described walking the block and seeing “guts and brains.…That shit be like some real walkin’ hell shit,” he said. “N—s gettin’ laid out.”

  Shaw watched the video with Metcalf and, dutifully—in exchange for substantial assistance at sentencing time—he pointed out Mack. Though the filmmakers identified him only as Matt Doogie, Metcalf was thrilled to have a visual of his target.

  “Now I could hear his voice and see his mannerisms,” he said.

  Still, not even Shaw, who was from New York City and forged the initial connection to Mack through a cousin, knew Mack’s real name. He could, however, describe the general vicinity of the Harlem heroin mill where Mack “stepped on,” or cut, the pure tan powder, diluting it to extend their profits before re-rocking it into pucks.

  Metcalf now had more than enough proof to arrest Mack based on witness testimony and scores of cellphone exchanges among Jones, Shaw, and Mack. But where exactly was the apartment, and who exactly was Mack? He felt as if he were being taunted by a ghost.

  “Most agents would have written it off, but Metcalf was not gonna leave it alone,” Wolthuis said.

  In a city of almost eight and a half million people, now all Metcalf had to do was find the ghost.

  Mack had recently been released from prison; Metcalf knew that much. One witness remembered that when Jones first landed in Woodstock and struggled to buy bulk heroin, a friend had tipped him off to Mack: “When my cousin gets out [of prison], it’s game on; he’s got the connects.”

  Mack was by now a pro, with lawyers on retainer and a network of assistants. Earlier, when he learned that Jones threatened to shoot a customer if he didn’t pay back his drug debt, Mack rebuked Jones, telling him, “Why would you do that? You’re running a business. If you want to harm someone, don’t do it yourself. We’ve got people for that.”

  But Mack didn’t always make the best choices about which details to delegate and which jobs to personally execute. When Shaw paid Mack back for the heroin he’d fronted him, the payments were retrieved in cities across the country—in MoneyGram kiosks from New York to San Diego. Someone was picking up the money for Mack, and Metcalf figured it had to be someone he trusted, a relative or girlfriend, perhaps. (On federal probation, Mack wasn’t allowed to leave the state without checking in with his probation officer.)

  Late one night, working out of the regional drug task force office in Front Royal, in the upstairs bedroom of an unmarked house, Metcalf reached out to the security department at MoneyGram, read out the transaction numbers from the text messages, and ultimately came away with a woman’s name and several seemingly random addresses in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx.

  He cross-referenced the addresses and found one that turned out to be legitimate. He was stunned when, the next morning, he ran that address through the city’s probation and parole database and found a single match: a Brooklyn probationer named Matthew Santiago. It had to be Mack.

  The thirty-seven-year-old New York native had recently finished a two-year prison stint for his part in a $2 million marijuana-trafficking conspiracy. He’d gotten out of prison just a few weeks before Jones’s business in Woodstock picked up.

  “What’s he look like?” Metcalf asked the probation officer.

  “Black male, with a beard.”

  Metcalf asked for a picture via email, and a few minutes later, there he was on his computer screen: an older version of Matt Doogie.

  Metcalf now had everything he needed to arrest Mack: a name, a picture, and an address.

  The night before, it had occurred to Bill Metcalf, when he was sorting through MoneyGram receipts, that he was no better than his father. The work had become its own kind of addiction. “We’re both chasing the same thing, on different sides of the law,” he said. “He enjoyed the streets and friends over family, and the pursuit of this lifestyle. And here I am, chasing those guys, and choosing that over my family.”

  His wife wanted to try for a boy; it would be their fifth child after four girls. “It’s one more jelly sandwich, who cares?” she argued, begging him, again, to ask for a desk job.

  After he cut the heart out of the monster, he promised, he’d ask for a transfer. For the first time, he meant it.

  He found Mack outside his apartment building in Brooklyn, walking his dog.

  “Who are you? Where you from?” Santiago wanted to know.

  “I’m an ATF agent from Virgi
nia, and that’s where you’re going,” Metcalf said.

  Santiago told him that he’d never been to Virginia, which may have been true.

  Santiago had two children. They would be seventeen and fourteen by the time his case rolled through a federal courtroom in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the following year. Judge Michael Urbanski would approve a plea deal negotiated after a series of meetings between Wolthuis and Santiago’s lawyer—who, incidentally, had been at the Southern District of New York courthouse in Manhattan waiting for him on the day of his arrest. “The elevators opened, and there was his lawyer; he’d already beaten us there,” Metcalf said, believing the quick legal service signified high-level cartel connections.

  Wolthuis wasn’t so sure, saying that the E-word—evidence—just wasn’t there. “If Santiago was truly Mr. Big, why would he be selling to a couple of wahoos in a small Virginia town?”

  Santiago had tried to find work when he got out of prison, picking up odd jobs, his attorney wrote in his presentence memorandum. But finding legitimate employment is exceedingly hard for felons, and the odd-job income wasn’t enough to provide for his family, so “against his better judgment [he] drifted back into criminal activity,” his attorney noted. “He deeply regrets his actions, and is aware of the strict penalty he is about to face. He has let down his children and feels a great sense of guilt and shame for his actions.” His father was murdered when he was four months old, and Santiago, a high school dropout, grew up mired in poverty, the report said. In his late twenties, he ran a small party- and event-planning company, called Self-Made, and worked freelance as a music-video stylist.

  Compared with Jones, who received a twenty-three-year prison sentence, and Shaw, whose cooperation earned him the lesser sentence of eighteen years, Santiago was merely a “flipper,” as Wolthuis described him, not part of the on-the-ground heroin distribution ring. He pleaded guilty to distributing between three and ten kilos of heroin, which equates to an average of sixty-five thousand shots of the drug, and was sentenced to ten years in federal prison.

  On the day of his sentencing, Metcalf personally transported him to a federal courthouse in Charlottesville. On the way, Santiago tried to taunt him. He wanted to know if Metcalf had heard about the recent slaying of two New York Police Department officers. They’d been ambushed by a Baltimore man who bragged on Instagram that he was “putting wings on pigs.” Metcalf nodded.

  “Metcalf, you really think you’re doing something, don’t you?” Santiago said. “But you ain’t changing nothing. This shit ain’t going away.”

  “Man, I’m just doing my job,” Metcalf said.

  “Helluva thing to take a man away from his family,” Santiago said.

  “Yes, it is,” Metcalf agreed.

  Santiago reminded him one more time: There were people out there who were not afraid to put wings on pigs.

  Jones and Santiago were right, of course. Shit did not stop. That’s not the way addiction works. That’s not typically how prison reentry plays out. It didn’t stop when Dennis Painter’s father moved heaven and earth to get him into treatment again in the wake of Jesse Bolstridge’s death—only to have him continually push through the revolving door of rehab, relapse, and jail.

  Naming his new baby after Jesse as a reminder didn’t stop Dennis’s behavior either. Nor did the abstinence-only Nashville treatment center his dad sent him to, his seventh attempt to get clean. “I’ve never gone through the stages of grief about Jesse,” Dennis told me. He said he’d tried to kill himself “like six times, but it just didn’t work. I’ve just been getting high since it happened.”

  When the Jones/Shaw ring came to a close, Dennis and his friends simply got back on the heroin highway to Baltimore—although in nearby Winchester he could now buy it for $20 a bag, compared with $30 when bought from a runner in Woodstock.

  I told Dennis that Jesse’s mom, Kristi, really needed to know what happened the morning that Jesse died. “She wants me to vividly describe what I saw when I walked into the bathroom, but she doesn’t need that image in her head,” Dennis said. He added that he used to go to Jesse’s grave but stopped because it was just too hard. “I have a lot of guilt about it. I want to write a letter, get some things off my chest. It feels like if I’d never gone to get the dope that day, he’d still be alive today.” Dennis used to spend Thanksgiving at Jesse’s house. He, too, had preschool pictures of them at Grasshopper Green.

  Dennis described the problem exactly as Metcalf had: If OxyContin had been the economic driver in the Appalachian coalfields, then the heroin highway to Baltimore had become one of the few avenues left for America’s small-town working class. Can’t get a job in a factory? Drive to Baltimore instead. An investment of $4,000, or 50 grams of heroin, could earn a person $60,000 in a single week.

  Don’t want to drive all the way to Baltimore? Your returns won’t be as high, but you could now drive in just twenty minutes to Little Baltimore: Martinsburg, West Virginia. That’s what happens when rural America becomes the new inner city, ranking dead last behind cities, suburbs, and small metro areas in measures of socioeconomic well-being that include college attendance, income, and male labor-force participation.

  “They can make all the task forces they want, but they’re never gonna stop it because the profits are just too great,” Dennis said. “And the heroin is only getting closer and closer and closer.”

  Dennis’s plan, when I talked to him the summer after Santiago went to prison, was to take what some call the geographic cure. He wanted to move to a bigger city with a younger and more ingrained sober-living culture, along with better jobs. “I’ve already moved from Strasburg to Middletown thinking that would help, but I just found people there. Then I moved to Winchester, but I found people who got high there, too.” His girlfriend used to hear him talking to himself in the bedroom, “but I think he’s really talking to Jesse,” she told me.

  His next move, I learned from a sheriff’s department Facebook posting, was to get hauled back to jail on a probation violation. In his mug shot, Dennis wore an orange jumpsuit, and his eyes were so squinty you couldn’t tell they were blue. He was down to 140 pounds, from his usual 185.

  I had just interviewed Dennis’s girlfriend, Courtney, the mother of his children. She was attending community college to become a paralegal; her kids went to a federally funded day care facility while Dennis’s father paid for their housing. She was working at McDonald’s in Strasburg, where Jesse bought his McNuggets on the weekend of his death. One of the low-level dealers in the Jones/Shaw ring—the guy who sold them the heroin that killed Jesse—often showed up at her drive-through window for food.

  In 2013, Jesse’s was one of 8,257 heroin-related deaths in the nation, by far the majority of them young men, an increase of a staggering 39 percent over the previous year.

  Roughly three-quarters of the dead had started down the same painkiller path that led Jesse to his death, the same path as Spencer Mumpower, Scott Roth, and Colton Banks—with a single prescription pill.

  A month after Jesse’s death, the FDA approved a new high-potency, long-acting version of hydrocodone, Zohydro ER, even after its own expert panel voted 11–2 against it, noting that the drug, which lacked an abuse deterrent, could lead to the same level of addiction and abuse as OxyContin had in its original form. The FDA concluded that “the benefits of this product outweigh the risks.”

  It would be four more years before the FDA would ask a pharmaceutical company to withdraw an opioid pain medication because of its potential for abuse—Opana ER, and not until 2017—and by then the annual death toll for drug overdose had climbed to 64,000.

  Critics pointed out the inherent conflicts of a regulatory agency that both approves drugs and is then supposed to function as a watchdog over those drugs. The Zohydro approval was the OxyContin story all over again, said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a doctor who lobbies for stronger painkiller restrictions.

  “The most damaging thing Purdue did, it wasn’t the misbranding
of OxyContin they got in trouble for. It was that they made the medical community feel more comfortable with opioids as a class of drugs,” Kolodny told me. “But had the FDA been doing its job properly with regards to opioids, we never would have had this epidemic.”

  Two weeks before Jesse’s death, the FDA finally notified Barbara Van Rooyan via letter that a portion of her petition had been approved—specifically, her call to withdraw its approval of the original OxyContin. The point was by then moot, of course; Purdue had already voluntarily withdrawn it, three years after the reformulation came to market. “I think my petition did ultimately help [push the reformulation], but so many more people died while we were waiting for it,” Van Rooyan said. Months later, she said, after reading a New Yorker piece on the Sackler brothers, it dawned on her that the reformulation had almost certainly been prompted by the fact that Purdue was losing its patent on the original formulation, “not because they believed the reformulated version was safer, nor because of my petition.”

  Still, the letter from the FDA disgusted and angered her and made her mourn all over again for Patrick—and the thousands of newly extinguished lives.

  In the same letter, the FDA denied her secondary request, which was to have the drug limited to severe, acute, or terminal pain—and not prescribed for chronic use unless all other treatments had first been explored, guidelines most other countries in the world have adopted. Americans, representing 4.4 percent of the world’s population, consume roughly 30 percent of its opioids.

  Patrick had been dead now for nine years.

  It would be three more years before another federal agency would put his mother’s suggestions into practice.

  Part Three

  “A Broken System”

  George’s Chicken, Edinburg, Virginia