America’s Other Epidemic
Nikki King was 17 years old when she left the mountain hollow where she was raised by her grandparents and sneaked off to the University of Kentucky under cover of darkness. It was 2009, and the advice of her late grandmother Sue King echoed in her head as she drove: Leave. Go to college. And do not let anybody from the bigger, wider world think they’re better than you.
Sue died of a heart attack in 2000, when Nikki was 9. The opioid epidemic had already begun to infiltrate eastern Kentucky by then, and in Nikki’s mind the drug problem turned into a drug crisis shortly after Sue’s death, when her family went from sleeping with the screen door unlocked to buying new doors—without glass panes, which could be knocked out by burglars. Around that time, Nikki went to a birthday party where her friend’s mom stumbled and smashed the cake into the kitchen counter. Nikki later found her passed out on the toilet, surrounded by vomit and pill bottles.
By high school, Nikki had just one friend who lived with both parents. She remembers a teacher asking her classmates what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“A drawer,” one boy said.
“You mean an artist?”
“No, a draw-er”—someone who draws disability checks and doctor-shops for OxyContin prescriptions. The pills could be had for next to nothing through Medicaid and then resold on the black market for $1 a milligram. It was the only future he could imagine for himself.
Nikki knew by then that both her safety and her economic fortunes lay far from Letcher County. But her widowed papaw, Curt King, wanted her to stay home. He thought that Nikki should become a nurse, and that the community college would suffice. It didn’t matter that she had a 4.0 GPA, and he had no reference point for her high ACT score. “He didn’t understand AP classes,” she told me. “He thought that meant I was slow.”
The night she ran away, Nikki stopped at an Arby’s halfway to Lexington because she was shaking too hard to drive. She’d been planning the move her entire senior year, covertly applying for scholarships and saving up $800 by working at a comic-book store. But she hadn’t ever set foot on campus, and she worried about Papaw, who was 72 and had never lived alone. She’d waited for him to fall asleep before tiptoeing out the door, and when she imagined him waking to an empty house the next morning, her shaking turned to deep, heaving sobs. Ugly crying, she calls it.
Nikki thought about going back. But then she remembered one of her last conversations with her grandmother. She had forbidden Nikki from going to a certain friend’s house. They’d both heard that the friend’s mom had become addicted to OxyContin prescribed for a back injury, and had started buying pills from a dealer when her prescription ran out. She was arrested for illegal possession, then released on probation without any treatment. When she relapsed, she feared she’d lose custody of her kids for failing a drug test. Her dealer told her she could erase the OxyContin from her system by drinking Clorox. So she did, and it
