The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels

Vance’s memoir tells the story of his upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, a rural community in the state’s southwestern corner, a place that had sunk into hard times after the loss of a steel mill, a common narrative across the region. Vance’s 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, which dropped into the national consciousness and onto the bestseller lists just as a previously overlooked demographic-disaffected poor people-were lumped together into what was becoming known as “Trump country.” Much of that public association derived from J. And everyone in the country, it seemed, knew Ohio as the epicenter of this new epidemic. Users were warned not to trust what they were buying the dose they thought would get them high might be enough to kill an elephant.Įveryone in Ohio, it seemed, knew someone who had been affected. The target kept moving-first oxycodone, then heroin, then carfentanil. Public health workers, statisticians, journalists, and government officials scrambled along with first responders to keep up with this runaway new phenomenon in crime, public health, and civic worry. Prescription drugs were the most common killer, but synthetic narcotics, most notably fentanyl, were on the rampage. The following year, 2017, Ohio posted the second-highest rate in the United States of opioid overdose deaths-4,293 died that year-well over twice the national average. The term opioid had become inseparable from its new suffix, crisis. The southern part of the state, joined by its contiguous neighbors West Virginia and Kentucky, represented a larger Appalachian region ravaged by prescription and street drugs, with overdose rates at the highest levels in the United States. When my son Evan began working at the firehouse in 2016, Ohio was in the throes of an opioid epidemic, among the worst in the nation in its onslaught of overdoses.

The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels