The Wrong Way to Fight the Opioid Crisis

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Jamie Maynard’s husband, Timothy, abused drugs, and he hit her. In 2012, after four years of marriage, she left him. Jamie and her two small sons moved in with her parents, postal workers who lived west of Columbus, Ohio, in a tidy white house amid soybean fields. Jamie quit her job, at Old Navy, to work as a state-licensed dealer at the Hollywood Casino, which paid much better—nearly three thousand dollars a month, plus benefits. The Columbus press compared the casino’s façade to a “corrections center just waiting for its barbed wire fence to be installed,” but Jamie, who was twenty-three, found the place exciting.

Gamblers often sought out flamboyant dealers who tapped their tips jar and cried, “Tokes for the folks!” Jamie preferred not to be noticed. She liked working the busiest shift—from eight at night until four in the morning—partly because she was less likely to be left standing alone at a gaming table, feeling exposed.

She became one of the fastest blackjack dealers on the floor, but the countless repetitive motions inflamed a rotator-cuff injury from her days playing high-school softball. A friend gave her a “perc thirty”—a black-market, thirty-milligram version of Percocet, which contains the powerful opioid oxycodone. A quarter of a pill allowed Jamie to work in comfort. It also gave her energy and confidence. Timothy had called her stupid, but in the casino job Jamie realized that she had a talent for what she called “instant math.” As her self-assurance improved, so did her tips. In the spring of 2013, she bought a used Chevy Cobalt, cranberry red. Driving it around, she played Taylor Swift on repeat.

Jamie began running a high-limits blackjack table with a fifty-dollar buy-in. She felt guilty watching her regulars risk their savings and, in some cases, lose their homes. Taking a whole perc thirty before her shift eased the discomfort of feeling like an accessory to other people’s misfortune.

In high school, Jamie had smoked marijuana, and at parties someone had always offered pills, including the catastrophically addictive opioid Oxycontin, which Purdue Pharma began marketing aggressively in 1996, when she was seven. Mixing an opioid with the sedative Xanax was said to offer a “Cadillac high.” By the time Jamie started at the casino, opioids were more abundant in Ohio than almost anywhere in the United States. According to Drug Enforcement Administration data analyzed by the Washington Post, between 2006 and 2012 more than four hundred and twenty-five million pills were shipped to residents of Franklin County, which includes Columbus, and nearby Madison County, where Jamie lived.

Jamie and Timothy met in 2006, the summer before her senior year. She didn’t realize that Timothy had a drug addiction until he was arrested for stealing. He sobered up in prison. After he was released, Jamie married him. Not long after that, he brought home heroin. Jamie watched him liquefy the dope in a spoon, over the flame from a cigarette lighter, then inject himself with the fluid. The next day, she let Timothy shoot her up: she didn’t want him to leave her. After using heroin for a few months, Jamie stopped; never having heard of withdrawal, she weathered what she assumed was a stomach flu. She had stayed clean all this time—until the perc thirties.

Jamie bought her percs from another user, S., a high-school friend whom she began dating around the time she took the casino job. His mom rented a duplex in the Hilltop, Columbus’s worst drug district. A dealer lived several doors down. S.’s mom allowed her son and his friends to use at her place in exchange for dope.

Perc thirties sold for a dollar per milligram. Jamie’s habit grew to three pills a day—more than six hundred dollars a week. After paying her bills and her parents, Debbie and Frank Barton, for rent and babysitting, Jamie spent the remainder of her salary on pills. One day, when she couldn’t find her next dose, S. suggested heroin as a temporary substitute. (Molecularly, the two drugs are extremely similar.) A hit cost only ten dollars. Jamie prepared the dope on a square of aluminum foil and smoked it. The high lasted all day.

Her heroin dealer lived in another part of the Hilltop. Back alleys crosscut the district, making properties easy to enter via rear entrances. The dealer instructed Jamie to park in the alley behind the bungalow where he lived with his family. Downstairs, he kept what Jamie thought of as a normal home, with nice sofas and a coffee table; upstairs, he worked out of a “trashed” office. Amid the mess were guns and safes. Jamie noticed that the office always contained “the most random” items. Users would trade a four-hundred-dollar television for a fifty-dollar half gram of heroin. Jamie once paid with a chain saw.

A dabbler uses to get high; a person with an addiction uses to stay well. A lapse in consumption triggers withdrawal. The muscles cramp. The skin crawls. The legs spasm, especially at night. The insomnia is crushing. There are drenching sweats, rattling chills. One heroin user, in a 2016 F.B.I. documentary, said that during withdrawal people are “crapping on themselves” and “puking on themselves”; another user said, “You’ll do anything to make it stop.” Withdrawal can lead to life-threatening dehydration, and often causes uncontrollable crying and suicidal thoughts. Jamie told me, “You’re scared to be sick.”

Her arms became skeletal. She stopped doing her hair and makeup. Her sisters—Kim, a paramedic, and Kristin, a nurse—asked their parents to intervene. Jamie refused to go to rehab, for fear of losing her job and her health insurance. Confessing that she used to take heroin with her husband, she told her family that she had got clean before, on her own, and could do it again. The attempt lasted twelve hours. But Jamie fooled everyone by eating more and paying better attention to her appearance.

She often bought dope on her way to work—the Hollywood Casino was in the Hilltop, on the site of a former General Motors factory. For privacy, she slipped into the rest room of a Taco Bell or smoked in her car, where she stashed fast-food straws and aluminum foil.

Other users were Jamie’s best source of information and help. “If your dealer wasn’t answering the phone, or if they were going to be an hour and you were sick, you’d find a friend to get it, so that you could use quicker,” she told me. Users knew which dealers cut dope with coffee grounds, and who sold only to regulars. If a friend bought heroin on Jamie’s behalf, she reimbursed him or her, and vice versa. Users might “tax” each other: a few bucks, a pack of Marlboros, gas. It was common and expected to “break off a piece,” for personal use.

Jamie limited her circle to people she knew, if only by a first name. She knew a guy who knew a girl named Courtney, who, in the spring of 2015, was looking for Xanax and “subs,” or Suboxone, a prescription medication that helps heroin users get clean by averting withdrawal symptoms. The first time that Jamie and Courtney met in person was at a gas station in the Hilltop. Jamie was turning twenty-six; Courtney was twenty-four. Jamie, who had long blond hair and dimples, was athletic and wore sporty clothes; Courtney, who had dark hair and a heart-shaped face, liked bling and bows, and had a horse named Taco. Both women had chosen full-time employment over college, and came from hardworking families in the Columbus suburbs. Courtney had a direct and lively personality, but she never explained to Jamie how she had got into drugs. Occasionally, they spoke, vaguely, about how they hated the direction their lives had taken, and how much they wished they could change.

Courtney, whose last name was Penix, worked as a nanny in Worthington Hills, a suburb of Columbus. She had a boyfriend who lived near Dayton; on Facebook, she told her friends that she was in the first stable relationship of her life. Recently, she had begun spending most nights with him, then driving to Columbus for work. She started texting Jamie when she came to town. In early March, she wrote, “Hey i know someone with xanax if u ever have anyone that wants some.” Jamie wasn’t interested.

Several days later, Jamie heard from Courtney again: “Hey can u get h.” When Jamie said that she could probably find some, “in an hour or so,” Courtney said, “Damn. U can’t make it sooner?” As they discussed when and where to meet, Courtney said, “I just need to leave my house so my parents don’t question me.” The next night, she told Jamie, “That was some good shit u got.” Jamie asked, “You want more?”

Jamie and Courtney traded calls and texts throughout the month. March 20th: Courtney complained about a “bitch” who had asked her for drugs, and then balked after “I told her either she pays me 25 for em or gives me gas money.” March 22nd: Courtney asked Jamie to cover her for Xanax, but she declined. At the end of March, when no one in the Hilltop seemed to have Xanax, Courtney asked about heroin, noting, “Idk if it will help my withdrawals but I can try I guess.”

In early April, Courtney wanted subs and Xanax but couldn’t leave work. Jamie offered to bring them to her, before reporting to the casino. Courtney gave Jamie her employers’ address, saying, “Just make sure nothing happens please, I have 2 kids here.” Jamie, whose sons were five and three, replied that she would “never put kids in danger.”

Jamie never stole to support her addiction or smoked when her children were around. She tended to respond to Courtney like a patient older sister. When Courtney nagged her for running late, Jamie didn’t react; when Courtney asked her to leave drugs in an unlocked car, for pickup, she refused. Courtney said that she had recently been robbed at gunpoint, and Jamie worried that she would get herself killed.

On April 25th, Courtney headed to Columbus for her older sister’s birthday party. Joking that her boyfriend was driving her nuts, she told Jamie, “I’m about to do the rest of these Xanax,” adding that when the pills were gone she’d “be fucked.” Jamie, recognizing Courtney’s fear of withdrawal, replied, “Well worst case scenario I can get you dope and that’ll help.”

Before Jamie could track anything down, Courtney found her own supply of Xanax. She asked if Jamie wanted some. Jamie said, “No I’m good.”

April 27, 2015, was a blustery Monday. Courtney asked Jamie for Xanax again. When an hour and a half elapsed, with no response, she requested “150 worth” of heroin “and a rig,” meaning a needle and a syringe.

Jamie had already planned to use, before her night shift. By 5 p.m., she was at her dealer’s house, smoking. As the dealer measured out Courtney’s share, Jamie checked in, by text. Courtney told her, “I just tried to get more money from those check loan places and they wouldn’t do it lol.”

“Lmao,” Jamie replied. “I just got you $175 worth plus two rigs so you owe me $180.”

They agreed to meet outside a Walmart on Hilliard-Rome Road, a corridor dense with fast-food restaurants and big-box chains. At around 5:20 p.m., Jamie parked next to Courtney’s Dodge Neon, got out, and spent the next two minutes talking with her. When she noticed Courtney slurring her words, she asked her, “Did you just take Xanax?” Combining heroin and Xanax produced the coveted Cadillac high, but every addict knew that the combination was dangerous. Courtney assured Jamie that she hadn’t taken Xanax since the previous night—Jamie believed her when she said, “I’m just sick.”

Jamie thought about how “livid” she’d be if another user, inches away, withheld the substance that would immediately make her well. She handed over the dope. The next text from Courtney’s phone arrived shortly after eleven o’clock. It said, “Courtney has passed away from an overdose.”

At first, Jamie thought that someone was playing a horrible prank, and didn’t respond. The next day, she returned to the Hilltop, and mentioned the text to her dealer. He warned her, “If the police come to talk to you, you’d better not mention me.” Jamie assured him that she wouldn’t. She later told me, “You always hear those stories about people telling who their dealer was, and then their family ends up dead.”

Jamie spent the summer expecting the police to question her about drugs. But what really anguished her was the thought that Courtney might still be alive were it not for their meeting. No longer concerned with her own life, Jamie spent more and more time high on heroin.

On August 12th, she had just begun her Wednesday-night shift when a casino security guard pulled her off the floor. Two plainclothes detectives from the Special Investigations Unit of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office were waiting to question her. Jamie responded to their small talk amiably, and signed a document acknowledging that she understood her legal rights.

Their initial questions were simple: Where do you live? Are you married? How old are your children?

Then: How did you know Courtney? Through a mutual friend, Jamie said. The older of the two officers, a sergeant, asked, “Did you ever move any other kind of drugs for him, other than Suboxone?” Jamie said no.

“Listen, we’re not here to arrest you for drug trafficking,” the sergeant told her. When was the last time she’d seen Courtney?

“I got a text message saying she was dead,” Jamie said, adding that she’d seen her that day.

“Do you remember what you guys did?”

“She was trying to find drugs.”

What kind of drugs? “Anything to make her well.” Did Jamie “help her out”? Jamie said that she couldn’t remember.

The sergeant told her he needed the truth: “We want to know where the dope came from that you gave to her.”

Jamie couldn’t imagine giving up her dealer’s name. Panicked, she said, “I want a lawyer then.”

The sergeant informed her that she was the subject of a homicide investigation. The charge would be involuntary manslaughter. Under state law, her offense would, like rape and aggravated robbery, be a felony of the first degree.

When Jamie’s parents learned of the investigation, they came to several devastating realizations at once: their daughter had a heroin addiction; her stable job and her improved appearance had been part of a sustained deception; she was in profound legal trouble. A young woman just like Jamie was dead. Frank and Debbie couldn’t imagine what Courtney’s family was going through, any more than they could fathom the idea of Jamie—who had never been in legal trouble—being held responsible for a homicide.

Eight days later, when Jamie reported for work, investigators were waiting to arrest her. They confiscated her phone, expecting her texts to match Courtney’s; they swabbed the inside of her mouth, expecting her DNA to align with forensic evidence collected from Courtney’s car.

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