28 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
AREPORTERAT LARGE
A DEADLY MISTAKE
Addicts who share a lethal dose of drugs are being prosecuted as killers.BY PAIGE WILLIAMS
After Jamie Maynard, of Ohio, became addicted to opioids,J
amie Maynard’s husband, Timo-
thy, abused drugs, and he hit her.
In 2012, after four years of mar-
riage, she left him. Jamie and her two
small sons moved in with her parents,
postal workers who lived west of Co-
lumbus, 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 thou-
sand dollars a month, plus benefits. The
Columbus press compared the casino’s
façade to a “corrections center just wait-
ing for its barbed wire fence to be in-
stalled,” but Jamie, who was twenty-
three, found the place exciting.
Gamblers often sought out flamboy-
ant 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 black-
jack dealers on the floor, but the count-
less repetitive motions inflamed a rota-
tor-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 stu-
pid, 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 Co-
balt, 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 discom-
fort 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 cat-
astrophically addictive opioid Oxycon-
tin, which Purdue Pharma began mar-
keting aggressively in 1996, when she
was seven. Mixing an opioid with the
sedative Xanax was said to offer a “Ca-
dillac high.” By the time Jamie started
at the casino, opioids were more abun-
dant in Ohio than almost anywhere in
the United States. According to Drug
Enforcement Administration data an-
alyzed by the Washington Post, be-
tween 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 steal-
ing. He sobered up in prison. After he
was released, Jamie married him. Not
long after that, he brought home her-
oin. Jamie watched him liquefy the dope
in a spoon, over the flame from a cig-
arette lighter, then inject himself with
the fluid. The next day, she let Timo-
thy shoot her up: she didn’t want him
to leave her. After using heroin for a
few months, Jamie stopped; never hav-
ing heard of withdrawal, she weathered
what she assumed was a stomach flu.
She had stayed clean all this time—
until the perc thirties.J
amie 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