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

by Sam Quinones

have a washer, and she missed school because she was too ashamed to wear them. Some judges had almost become social workers, yet they rarely found addicts willing to, in the words of one, “get into treatment if they’re not facing the threat of incarceration”—

I was winding up this book when COVID-19 arrived. The virus forced us apart and showed us how we needed each other. It also re-created the conditions that spawned the opioid epidemic: isolation, widespread job loss. Alone, addicts overdosed and died. “Sitting with somebody, looking at them eye to eye—‘We’re going to get through this’—that piece is missing,” a drug counselor told me.

COVID-19 instructed us on the importance of community, now that we had suddenly lost it, and how essential were those who nursed us and picked our lettuce. BLM showed that a sense of community was not possible without recognizing pain long ignored. BLM’s point was also to reveal privilege. Part of our privilege was to relegate to police the jobs that we preferred to forget or not pay for—like dealing with the mentally ill on our streets, whose numbers multiplied due to methamphetamine.

“I didn’t reach out to other people because of the shame,”

All in all, he was a useful but disposable part of the Mexican drug world in the United States.

The overdose hotspots multiplied. The city’s health department printed flyers warning addicts of a highly potent heroin on the streets, hoping to frighten users off the drug. Instead, addicts rushed to the housing project, eager to try it. To grab the market, dealers sold it in packets stamped with brand names like “Lethal Injection” and “Drop Dead.” The new stuff crowded out any lesser dope.

The sugar-dependent rats, however, turned hyperactive. This suggested that when these animals grew dependent on sugar, it “primed” them to use another drug. Dependence on one substance, in other words, prepared them for dependence on another.

Yet Americans considered it a minor problem, involving somebody else: junkies who flouted common sense and deserved what they got or, in Appalachia, hapless hillbillies who were to blame for their continued dysfunction.

Those who stayed faced unsettling prospects, particularly with the modest education that sufficed when a glass job meant you were set for life. The jobs now were at Walmart or pizza restaurants or in telemarketing.

Americans got used to medical miracles that allowed them to avoid the consequences of unhealthy behavior: treatments for diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, and heart disease. As the country aged, patients wanted relief from pain. Doctors would suggest long-term strategies: exercise, better diet, quitting smoking. Patients didn’t want to hear that—they just wanted to be fixed. Doctors felt their insistence.

reps. He embodied the new addict: a respected professional with a plaque on the wall, not a toothless back-alley user. And he was the first to publicly work at his own recovery without shame. “Most

He brought back commemorative law enforcement hats and patches from Bangkok to Tyler, Texas.

Our brain evolved to be easily distracted because those who weren’t got eaten. Our brain also required that we be physically touched by others—hugged, squeezed, kissed, patted on the back—as a way of reinforcing the group that kept us alive.

“We sue our libraries and we like to smoke our cigarettes,” said Michael Monks, editor of The River City News, Covington’s local newspaper. “And everyone loves to be tough on crime.”

“This disease of loving someone who has an addiction,” said one mother, “it brings you to your knees and sucks the life right out of you.” They also discovered that the policies many of them once supported had left their addicted loved ones with few alternatives besides prison or the streets.

Ink. She began removing visible tattoos—from the face, neck, and hands—of those leaving Kenton County jail, at no charge. From one youth’s forehead she removed “13.5”—“Twelve jurors, one defendant, and a half-assed chance of winning,” he told her.

nacho fries. The tag line: “He. Can’t. Escape. The Craving.” Neither