Salon.com > Evelyn Nieves

Prescription pill epidemic has spiraled out of control

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:55:00 +0000

In the small coal towns of southern West Virginia, the poorest patch of Appalachia, the police blotters these days read like big-city tabloid fodder. Last month, a 23-year-old man received up to 25 years in prison for wheeling a quadriplegic to a house against his will, carrying him inside, beating him and stealing his prescription painkillers. That same week, a 25-year-old man was charged with child neglect resulting in death for taking three prescription painkillers and passing out, suffocating his one-month-old son in his arms. The child's 21-year-old mother was charged as an accomplice.

A couple of weeks ago, the manager of a pain clinic in the Mingo County seat of Williamson (nickname “Pilliamson”) pleaded guilty to “reluctantly selling drug prescriptions illegally”--abetting doctors in writing scripts for thousands of prescription pill addicts. “Patients” would line up at the clinic before it opened, like bargain shoppers at a Black Friday Christmas sale. And now, as the nation knows, the Mingo County sheriff is dead, shot at point-blank range as he sat in his car eating a sandwich.

Public libraries: The new homeless shelters

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:09:00 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO—Not everyone who spends all day, every day in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library is down and out. Only mostly everyone.

Kathleen Lee knows this because she spends hours a day walking the six floors of the vast, sky-lit building, looking for patrons who might need real help. They are everywhere: in the carrels, amid the stacks, on the computers. Some wear all they own on their backs and all they’ve lived through on their faces. Others hide in plain sight. Lee knows this, too, since she was homeless a few years ago. So she tries to let everyone know who she is and what she does.

I strike up a lot of conversations,” she said at the end of a recent three-hour shift.

America’s pill-popping capital

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:45:00 +0000

KERMIT, W.Va. -- It takes less than a minute to drive past Kermit, five to tour the place entirely. An old coal mining town with barely 300 residents and one blinking light between the train tracks, Kermit has no supermarket, no clothing store, no main drag. Main Street is really a side street with rows of cottages, its biggest building, the Kermit community center, empty and boarded.

Yet in this tiny town, the Kermit Sav-Rite Pharmacy used to be as busy as a New York deli. Six employees worked the counter, lines at the drive-through window snaked around the square cinder-block building, and the parking lot was full day and night.

Of course, everyone in Kermit — just about everyone in the wooded hollows of Mingo County — knew the Sav-Rite was a pill mill. It handed out Xanax, Lortabs, Vicodin — all manner of the prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs that are crippling Appalachia like a rogue disease — to anyone with an excuse. Kermit, which sits in the poorest, most remote corner of southwest West Virginia at the Kentucky border, was drawing pill addicts from all over the Eastern seaboard. People were throwing pill parties in the parking lot. Trading pills, buying, selling, injecting, snorting, the works.

Saturday night in Slab City

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

SLAB CITY, Calif. -- A punishing sun was finally giving way to night, and that meant show time at the Range.

In the desert of southeastern California, about 190 miles east of Los Angeles and 127 feet below sea level, people filed out of trailers and trucks and buses and headed to a stage built on a concrete slab. Under rows of Christmas lights and a million stars, they took their seats on busted sofas, junked lawn chairs, the extracted back seats of old sedans. Then they started hooting. William "Builder Bill" Ross had strapped on his six-string.

"Good audience!" he said, and people hooted some more.

It was Saturday night at Slab City, when people who live here will tell you that the best of the Slabs is on display. Not just the performers who play the Range, but also the audience. Everyone in this remote squattersville off the grid and off the map shows up: the hermits, the tweakers, the preachers, the old-timers, the newcomers, the families.

These weekly sundown concerts at Slab City, made famous by the 2007 film "Into the Wild," are always packed come November, when trailered retirees from all over the country come here to live free for the winter. But in the last few years, the wretched economy has brought more people who've lost everything to Slab City than ever before, and the concerts fill up all the time. About 150 people show even in high summer, nearly double the summer population of Slab City just four years ago.

Apocalyptic squattersville for recession refugees

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

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How George Carranco wound up in Slab City, a squattersville at the end of the earth, is a story for these hard times.

Carranco, an ex-Marine and jack-of-all-trades, lost his job at a factory in San Diego when it shut down, lost his apartment when he couldn't pay the rent, lost his temporary home when the city towed his van, and lost the van for good when the parking fees climbed to unattainable heights. More than a thousand dollars -- might as well have been a million.

Three years of bad breaks later, Carranco had had enough. He revived an '83 Dodge camper that he picked up for free and, with his girlfriend and five Chihuahuas, headed east, 155 miles from San Diego, to where the roads give up and the desert takes over.

Unwittingly, the 56-year-old Carranco had joined the latest wave of migrants to Slab City: refugees of the recession. Beaten down by a brutal economy, they're straggling to this desolate outpost of societal dropouts to recover their wits and duck the national malaise.

Oakland votes to permit large marijuana farms

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:48:00 +0000

Oakland has moved closer to becoming the first city in the nation to authorize wholesale pot cultivation.

The Oakland City Council voted 5-2 with one abstention late Tuesday in favor of a plan to license four production plants where marijuana would be grown, packaged and processed.

The vote came after more than two hours of public comment, with speakers divided between those who opposed the measure -- largely on the grounds that it would put small medical marijuana growers out of business -- and those who said it would generate millions of dollars for Oakland in taxes and sales and create hundreds of jobs.

The plants would not be limited in size -- one potential applicant for a license wants to open a plant that would produce over 21,000 pounds of pot a year -- but they would be heavily taxed and regulated.

Those vying for one of the four licenses would have to pay $211,000 in annual permit fees, carry $2 million worth of liability insurance and be prepared to devote up to 8 percent of gross sales to taxes.

Proponents of the measure also touted the possibility of Oakland becoming the nation's cannabis capital, especially if California voters approve the legalization of recreational marijuana in November.

San Francisco proposes controversial pet sale ban

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 18:07:00 +0000

As Philip Gerrie tells it, the idea of banning pet sales in San Francisco started simply enough, with a proposal to outlaw puppy and kitten mills.

West Hollywood, Calif. had done it, with little fanfare. Why not the city of St. Francis, patron saint of animals, which prides itself on its compassion toward all creatures great and small?

So Gerrie, a bee keeper and secretary of the San Francisco Commission of Animal Control & Welfare, a seven-member advisory board on animal issues to the city's lawmakers, decided to suggest adding the idea to the commission's agenda.

"Then we came across the idea of adding small animals as well," Gerrie recalled, "since all these animals are being euthanized" by animal shelters.

The proposed ban on puppy and kitten mills became a proposed ban on the sale of just about every animal that might end up in a shelter: gerbils, guinea pigs, birds, hamsters, turtles, snakes, rats. Sales of rabbits and chicks are already banned in the city.

The idea came back to bite the commission. It led to the panel's biggest, longest monthly meeting in recent memory, not to mention blogger fodder around the world.

Famous SF sea lions leave in droves

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:55:00 +0000

Two mysteries surround a huge herd of sea lions that were hanging out on a pier in San Francisco Bay: Why did so many show up, and why did so many leave at once?

Just last month, Pier 39, famous in San Francisco for its sea lions and the throngs of tourists they attract, was groaning under the weight of more than 1,500 of the animals. The record number delighted tourists and baffled experts.

Marine experts suspect the sea lions came and stayed for the food, then left largely for the same reason.

"Most likely, they left chasing a food source," said Jeff Boehm, executive director of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, which runs an information center and gift shop at Pier 39. "It's probably what kept them here in the first place."

The animals began leaving in droves the day after Thanksgiving, almost as if someone had issued an order. But Boehm said the fact that so many sea lions stayed for so long is even stranger than their disappearance.

"They do move off," Boehm said, adding that in the fall, older sea lions head to breeding colonies in the Channel Islands, off the coast of Southern California along the Santa Barbara Channel. Younger sea lions, he said, "don't mind those rules and tend to travel far and wide."

In Navajo country, racism rides again

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 13:00:00 +0000

No one wanted another 1974. Not the Navajo, and definitely not the city of Farmington, which is still living down the Navajo murders of that spring, not to mention their aftermath.

But here it is, 32 years later, and the old wounds are wide open. Once again, violent, racially charged incidents between whites and Navajos in Farmington, on the eastern edge of the sprawling Navajo reservation, have outraged Indian country. Once again, a city trying to shake its nickname as "the Selma, Ala., of the Southwest" is on the defensive. And, once again, what's happening here in northern New Mexico is prompting talk of border-town racism on reservations all over the country.

This all started with a beating in Farmington in June. A 47-year-old Navajo man who was offered a ride by three white teenagers in Farmington was driven to the outskirts of town, beaten with a stick and punched and kicked. He said they used racial slurs as they pummeled him.

Skid row makeover

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 11:30:00 +0000

To see the old skid row of the down and out and the new skid row of the well-to-do, look no farther than the Frontier Hotel.

Smack in the heart of the nation's biggest poor neighborhood, the hotel rents to both the poor and the wealthy, albeit through separate entrances.

The Frontier's poor people's entrance, on Fifth Street, has iron gates, burly guards who ask you your business and a long, dark foyer with a clerk behind thick glass. The Main Street entrance, for urban pioneers renting new lofts on the hotel's upper floors, has a gleaming white lobby, potted palms and marble floors.

The Fifth Street renters, who pay about $100 a week, have no access to the Main Street side. And loft dwellers, who pay from about $1,100 a month to $3,900 a month, have no reason to venture to the Fifth Street side, where the hotel is still known as a rundown flophouse, one step up from the streets.

Skid row's new Frontier makes poor people and their advocates shudder. It's not just the hotel, which the owner intends to fully convert to market-rate lofts, that puts them on edge. It's everything, they say, that suggests that the grand plans for the nation's largest skid row -- 50 square blocks of prime real estate in the largest city in the country after New York -- are leaving out the poor, mostly black people who live there now: