A scrawny junkie with sunken eyes and sticky-out collarbones, as Spencer described himself to me in 2012, “I looked ridiculous, like I had chicken pox. Like I’d stuck my head down a groundhog’s lair.” But I had failed, just as the police and parents had, to connect young adults like Spencer to the rural addicted, even though Spencer told me he’d come to his heroin addiction the same way they had—through prescription opioid pills.
