“You say inappropriate things often?” McDaniel asked.
“I’m closing in on fifty; I am an inappropriate thing.”
“To answer your question—and thank you very much—I’m as obsessive about exercise as I am about donuts.”
“I wish exercise went with my love of lasagna.”
“I do Pilates every weekday morning at five a.m. just so I can eat like this.” She dipped her donut and brought the end to her mouth.
“I’m up at five every morning too,” Del said. “I go to the bathroom and go back to bed.”
She laughed and quickly put her hand to her mouth, just below her nose. She looked for a moment like she might spit out her coffee. Then she waved at him and turned her head, using a napkin to wipe her mouth. After a moment she said, “Give me some warning next time.”
Del liked her. She seemed real, without pretenses. He’d also noticed that her left hand was not sporting a ring. He sat back. His legs felt heavy and his body weary from the lack of sleep, but the anxiety he’d felt the past week had evaporated.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Sure,” McDaniel said.
“In the office, you said what happened to my niece wasn’t an unusual situation. What did you mean by that?”
McDaniel set down her coffee and wiped the tips of her fingers on a napkin. “You said she’d been in recovery just before her overdose?”
“She’d come home one day and told my sister she was done, that she wanted to quit. She said she was tired of the drugs and what they were doing to her. My sister called me, and I pulled some strings and got her into a rehab facility over in Eastern Washington. She’d been clean nearly three months. She attended NA meetings and was seeing a counselor; I got her a job at a Starbucks and she seemed to be really turning a corner—we all thought so. This hit us out of the blue.” Feeling emotional, Del stopped.
McDaniel set down her coffee. “When a heroin addict falls out of recovery, they’ll often go back to using the same amount of heroin . . . or the same strength of heroin they were using before they quit. Their bodies aren’t prepared for the dosage and, unfortunately, they’ll unintentionally overdose.”
“Cerrabone said you worked narcotics in Georgia.”
“I was prosecuting drug offenders. More recently, I was working on legislation to secure judicial alternatives for addicts.”
“What brought you out here?”
McDaniel shifted her eyes to the glass walls that looked out on to the sidewalk. “I needed a change of scenery after my divorce.”
“I needed a different planet after mine.”
“That bad?”
“Not good.”
“Do you have kids?” Celia asked.
“Thankfully, no. You?”
“A son.” She paused, then said, “I was looking to do some advocacy and I’d read that King County has a heroin task force exploring ways to combat the rise in usage. I’m on that task force.”
“I read about that,” Del said. He refrained from saying that he didn’t agree with it, not wanting to offend her.
“The rise in heroin use has become epidemic pretty much all over the country,” she said. “And the number of accidental deaths from opioid overdoses now exceeds fatal car crashes.”
Del shook his head. “Back in my day, only the real junkies did heroin.”
“Things changed with the legalization of marijuana. The Mexican drug cartels saw their revenue stream fading, plowed their pot fields, and planted poppies. People didn’t think about that when they were lobbying to legalize marijuana. It never made the media.”
“Increase the product and decrease the cost,” Del said. “Good old capitalism.”
“Big-time,” she said. “You can get heroin now for less than a pack of cigarettes. It wasn’t just the legalization of marijuana. Researchers also trace the dramatic increase in addiction to a shift in health-care philosophy that started to emphasize treating a patient’s pain rather than treating the underlying ailments. That led to an increase in opioid use.”
“I read about that too.”
“Opioid use previously restricted to the treatment of things like cancer or physical trauma suddenly became widely available for more broadly defined problems, like chronic pain. Not surprisingly, the drug companies introduced and aggressively marketed certain opioids, like oxycodone.”
“They had me on it when they operated on my shoulder,” Del said.
“Addicts quickly figured out how to circumvent the time-release pain medication by crushing or dissolving the pill, then snorting or shooting it.”
“So how did they get from that to heroin?”
“Availability and cost. When the addiction problem came to light, state legislatures passed laws making it more difficult to get opioids prescribed, and the manufacturer reformulated oxycodone so it couldn’t be crushed or dissolved. It seemed like two good responses, but both ignored the fact that you had a lot of addicted people who could either no longer get the drug or no longer afford it. That just paved the way for the Mexican drug cartels.”
“They moved to heroin and had a ready market.”
“They flooded the market with cheap, affordable heroin, making it the most commonly used drug by eighteen-to twenty-nine-year-olds. Not surprisingly, that demographic has had the largest increase in overdose deaths.”
“So we put the dealers in jail and give them significant sentences like ten years,” Del said, thinking of the new law.
“You put one in jail and you open a slot ten others will be waiting to fill.”
“Not if we ramp up the punishment. Not if we start ensuring they get the full ten years. A lot of dealers would think twice.”
She shook her head. “Dealers, maybe, but we can’t legislate habits that have formed over the last decade. If there are users, there will be suppliers, Del. An addict is an addict. Your niece was an addict. Criminalization only drives the addicts farther away from the people who love and can help them, to the people who will abuse them.”
Del felt his anxiety returning. “Yeah, well, I’m not going after the users. I’m going after the dealers. I say increase the penalty for dealing from ten years to twenty-five years to life and we’ll get rid of the dealers.”
“And put them where? Our jails are already overburdened. And what do you do with the addicts?”
Del didn’t have an immediate answer.
“You’re unfortunately seeing the problem from a side unfamiliar to you. And you’re upset and angry. You want someone to pay for the death of your niece.”
“I can’t say you’re wrong.”
“And that’s a common response. But the key now isn’t charging the criminals. It’s freeing the addicts of their addictions. We need more people like you, Del, who’ve seen the problem at its worst.”
Del stifled a grin. “I hope you didn’t bring me here to pitch me.”
“That’s not fair. I did the research and I provided you with the law. That’s what I was asked to do.”
Del wasn’t in the mood to argue. He was too damn tired. He slid back his chair and stood. “You’re right. Thanks. I appreciate it.”