The young woman is almost dead when the rescuers find her. She lies there with rolled eyes, limp and pale, in an abandoned house, between rubble and broken pieces and frozen piles of dung. The little bit of heartbeat she has left pumps the heroin through her veins. Only a few shallow breaths separate them from death. The men grab the woman and drag her out into the open, where the red and blue flickering lights of the police and fire engines mix into a disgusting, poisonous purple.
“Overdose, and what an overdose,” says the paramedic. “Does anyone know her name?” “Maybe that one over there,” says a policeman, pointing to a man in dirty jeans who is standing around crying and messing up his hair. The cop goes after the junkie. “Hey man, is that your girlfriend?” He hisses. “What’s her name? And what was it all about, getting her into that shitty shack?” The junkie whines. “Be careful, needles,” calls out a firefighter coming out of the house. Three thin syringes stick out of his fist. The paramedic bends over the young woman and gets to work.
It’s early evening in Huntington, a small town in West Virginia. The sun has sunk behind the black mountains, it will be an icy night. A woman is dying, her boyfriend is screaming, helpers fight for a life that is dying out, the neighbors gawk, attracted by the colorful flashes and the noise. “It’s a nightmare,” says the policeman.
But actually everything is just the same on this evening.
The nightmare in numbers: Scott Lemley collected them. He is in his thirties, a wiry man. Lemley has always been good at math, which is why the Huntington Police Department made him their statistician. In his office he manages Excel spreadsheets, graphics and maps, all very neatly and precisely. But when you put them together to form a picture, they make a picture of hell.
Huntington’s population is 50,000, along with the surrounding county, Cabell County, about 100,000. Lemley estimates that 14 percent of these people are drug addicts, most of them from so-called opioids. This includes heroin, which is sold as a gray or brown powder; but there are also other opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, powerful narcotics found in pain pills that the junkies dissolve and inject or sniff.
It often goes wrong: in 2015 there were 944 officially recorded opioid overdoses in Cabell County, 70 of which were fatal. The oldest dead, according to Lemley’s lists, was 77 years old. The youngest dead was twelve.
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