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

by Sam Quinones

Like many American towns, though, Columbus has invested little in mental-health housing. So if jails won’t do, police often take people in this man’s condition to Riverside’s emergency room. The next morning, as mood stabilizers calmed the patient, the ER staff learned more about him: he suffered from anxiety, and maybe he was bipolar, though it was too soon to tell; his mother was bipolar. Perhaps at the root of it all, staffers were not surprised to learn, he had been molested as a child. Overlaid on that traumatic past now was the new crystal methamphetamine. “When I first came [in 2015] we never saw meth,” said Dr. Megan Schabbing, a psychiatrist and director of the ER’s psychiatric ward. The city then was grappling with opioid addiction. Riverside opened its ER psychiatric ward to deal with those patients as police stopped taking them to jail. But nothing quite prepared the hospital for P2P meth. This began, if Megan Schabbing is any gauge, in May 2018, about the time she and the staff were getting used to treating patients on fentanyl. “Within a week, it was multiple people coming in on meth,” she remembered. “Elaborate delusional sentiments, violent. I watched a guy run through a set of very hard doors. We call it supermeth. They’re brought in by police, bashing in car windows, walking into a stranger’s house. They appear to be psychotic, look like they’re schizophrenic. But when they’re off the drug, they’re not. Riverside spent millions of dollars to retrofit its ...