The story of how the opioid epidemic came to change this country begins in the mid to late 1990s, in Virginia’s westernmost point, in the pie-shaped county sandwiched between Tennessee and Kentucky, a place closer to eight other state capitals than its own, in Richmond. Head north as the crow flies from the county seat of Jonesville and you’ll end up west of Detroit. Geopolitically, Lee County was the ultimate flyover region, hard to access by car, full of curvy, two-lane roads, and dotted with rusted-out coal tipples. It was the precise point in America where politicians were least likely to
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