The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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in her bedroom, and she felt a presence behind her. She turned around to see a man wearing a 1920s suit and a fedora. The man reached out to her, but then he disappeared.
By the time Miss Susan finished her story, Alicia's long eyes had gotten even wider, with a look that melded fear and delight. She smacked her lips softly.
“I'll never go in there again!”
“I want to go in that house, man!” said Elizabeth. She shot Alicia a glance with her hazel eyes, and I could see the energy that I hoped some day could be channeled in the direction of books and learning.
I was mesmerized by the story, feeling like a girl again myself. But even so, the cogs of my teacher's brain were turning. I couldn't help but think of the paperback series that Alicia and Elizabeth were reading. The books had many parallels with the stories that came out of their own cultural lives. The two children living in the sinister house on Cherry Street in the series had to contend with ghosts every bit as unruly as Alicia's Ghost Howard, or the unseen spirit in Miss Susan's old rental house.
“Are you still working on The Haunting today?” I asked, looking in Alicia's direction.
Alicia nodded, though she had become distracted with more important things. She and Blair, looking like sisters with their fine blonde hair and porcelain complexions, were whispering some giggly secret. Putting their two heads closer together, they suddenly flat out erupted in giggles. Alicia had begun to turn red and was snorting from trying so hard not to squeal. Blair began to chant, and soon Alicia joined her. The two had their arms around each other:
"We're sisters!"
"We're sisters!"
I smiled with the two girls, but all of us at the table looked at them in a puzzled way.
“What makes you sisters?” I asked.
Soon we learned the story: both of their mothers were out on the streets. The trouble had come into Alicia's life in the form of a small white pill.
Only a few years before, a perfect storm—brewed of anxiety, despair, and the chronic health problems that afflict the poor in Appalachia—had gathered force in the neighborhood. It was a storm that had already cast its shadows upon poor white communities across the Appalachian region and in rural Maine. In 1996, the prescription painkiller OxyContin was released on the market by Purdue Pharma. The drug's active ingredient was a synthetic opiate—oxycodone—with a twelve-hour time release that was supposed to reduce the likelihood of addiction. But weekend drug users who were used to crushing milder painkillers—Vics (Vicodin), Percs (Percocet)—for a short-term buzz made a discovery: when crushed to disable the time-release function and either snorted or injected, OxyContin yielded an intense, warm rush, an opiate high. The journey from weekend user to addict could be as short as weeks. Suddenly whole communities of unsuspecting thrill seekers were finding themselves reeling from the impact of an addictive opiate. The difference was that this was a prescription drug, and the dealer could be anyone: a grandmother, a neighbor or friend, anyone with a prescription.1 Someone on Medicaid with a chronic pain problem could get an OxyContin prescription for one dollar. By the time my class was in full swing, the drug had acquired a new name: hillbilly heroin. Entire families and communities were transformed. In one old-industry Appalachian town in Ohio, nearly one in ten babies would, before the decade's end, test positive for drugs, with painkillers in the lead.2
The cycle of addiction caught many by surprise. As Paul Tough wrote in a 2001 article in the New York Times Magazine: “When you hold it in your hand, an OxyContin pill doesn't seem any different than a Tylox or a Percocet or any of the mild narcotic preparations that have for years seeped out of the pharmaceutical pipeline and into the lives of casual drug users. Despite appearances, OxyContin actually belongs to the other side of the drug drive; it might look like a casual Saturday-night drug, but it's a take-over-your-life drug.”3 As the medical community became increasingly aware of the drug's diversion, tighter safeguards were set up around its prescription, making the drug more costly on a street market. The going price by the early 200 was one dollar per milligram, forty dollars for a forty-milligram pill.4 Users could snort or inject four or more pills a day. People who would never have imagined themselves as hard drug users found themselves turning from OxyContin to a cheaper drug, heroin, that satisfied their need for opiates. Many of the new addicts were younger, people in their twenties or thirties. Some poor women who did the drugs turned to the one commodity they had in a cash market—their bodies—to raise the needed money for pills or powder.
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