30 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
friends to use at her place in exchange
for dope.
Perc thirties sold for a dollar per mil-
ligram. 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 tempo-
rary 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 in-
structed Jamie to park in the alley be-
hind 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 no-
ticed 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 in-
somnia 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 them-
selves”; another user said, “You’ll do any-
thing 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. Con-
fessing 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 atten-
tion 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 Gen-
eral 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 be-
half, 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 pre-
scription 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 sta-
tion in the Hilltop. Jamie was turning
twenty-six; Courtney was twenty-four.
Jamie, who had long blond hair and dim-
ples, 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 fam-
ilies 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 boy-
friend who lived near Dayton; on Face-
book, 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 Colum-
bus for work. She started texting Jamie
when she came to town. In early March,
she wrote, “Hey i know someone withxanax 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?”J
amie 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 withdraw-
als 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 re-
porting 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 ad-
diction 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 birth-
day 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