The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

by Sam Quinones

In the late 1960s, to the alarm of their countrymen and elected officials, US soldiers fighting in Vietnam began returning home addicted to heroin. Yet the great majority of those soldiers kicked dope when they got home. They were no longer at war. They were distant from the drugs. They were back home in places where heroin, if there was any at all, was expensive and feeble. The Far East heroin of the 1970s crossed two continents and an ocean and went through New York before reaching the addict’s arm, weak and expensive. Nothing like what they’d encountered in Southeast Asia. By the late 1990s, that changed. The supply of prescription pain pills was massive and everywhere, because doctors prescribed them. Heroin followed; supplies skyrocketed, and prices fell. If the pills were potent, the heroin was more so, for it came now from relatively close by, in Colombia and Mexico. Unlike those soldiers returning from Vietnam, these new addicts could not escape it. The dope was at their high schools, in their locker rooms. Even small rural towns had pill and heroin dealers. The sellers popped up in states with no history of opioid abuse: Utah, Tennessee, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Maine, Indiana, North Carolina, and they were all over the state of Ohio.