34 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
at their disposal”—including the death
penalty.
That year, the National District At-
torneys Association, in its first white
paper on the opioid crisis, urged law-en-
forcement agencies and prosecutors to
“treat every overdose death as a homi-
cide and assign homicide detectives to
respond to these scenes.” The paper’s
authors argued that “the potential of
being charged with homicide” provided
an “added incentive for a dealer to co-
operate with law enforcement and pro-
vide other actionable intelligence for
broader distribution networks.” State
prosecutors can exert leverage by threat-
ening defendants with the prospect of
federal charges—the mandatory mini-
mum federal sentence for overdose ho-
micide is twenty years. Jared Shapiro,
another attorney for Jamie Nelson, in
Florida, told me that investigators have
the mistaken “impression that they can
charge low-level offenders and get them
to flip, creating a crumbling pyramid in
which El Chapo types will fall.”
Hoffer, the Case Western anthro-
pologist, said that, as the opioid crisisdrags on, the overdose-homicide ap-
proach has become “low-hanging fruit.”
Collins, the Columbus defense attor-
ney, told me that such prosecutions pro-
mote a grotesque misreading of the com-
plexity of addiction; it is obscene, he
said, to equate overdose deaths with
“hard-core murder cases.”F
ranklin County, the most populous
in Ohio, sits at the center of a state
geographically primed for multidirec-
tional trade. Interstates 70 and 71 con-
nect to Denver, Cincinnati, Cleveland,
and Pittsburgh. Columbus, one of
the fastest-growing metropolises in the
Midwest, has been called Test City,
U.S.A., because so many retail and fast-
food companies try out new products
there. It’s been said that if you “raked
America together you’d find Columbus.”
In the late nineties, a Mexican drug
faction, the Xalisco Boys, identified
Franklin County as a promising mar-
ket for black-tar heroin, which resem-
bles chips of coal. Sam Quinones, the
author of the 2015 book “Dreamland,”
describes the Xalisco Boys as “our quiet-est traffickers” and “our most aggres-
sive.” Couriers move in and out of the
Columbus area, renting apartments with
cash. Testifying at a 2017 congressional
hearing, Mike DeWine, who was Ohio’s
attorney general at the time and is now
the governor, compared buying heroin
to ordering a pizza: “You get it in half
an hour, and you are going to get it
cheap.” After Ohio shut down the pill
mills that proliferated with the advent
of Oxycontin and other opioids, users
found a ready substitute in heroin.
Illicit drugs are often cut with other
substances. With heroin, adulterants
include the potent painkiller fentanyl
and the tranquilizer carfentanil, which
is used to sedate elephants. Fentanyl
surfaced in the Franklin County drug
supply around 2014, and by the next
spring Ohio was leading the nation in
fatal opioid-related overdoses. Since
2015, more than fifteen thousand Ohio-
ans have died from taking such drugs.
In March, 2015, Franklin County’s
new coroner, Dr. Anahi Ortiz, created
a fatality-review board, to scrutinize
each unintentional-overdose death inPhil and Susan Penix, whose daughter Courtney took drugs supplied by Maynard, supported Maynard ’s prosecution.