To the memory of friends The first thing I remember thinking about what we now call “the opioid crisis” is that it was making everything really boring. It was 2010, I was in eleventh grade and at a house party about which I had been excited all week. I had with me a wingman in the form of my buddy Curt, and a fresh pack of smokes, and — please don’t think less of me — 750 milliliters of Absolut blueberry vodka. In short, all that was needed for a good night. And yet the party was a bust. It seemed that every third kid was “dipped out,” as we called those in drug-induced comas, lit cigarettes still dangling from their lips. Even the terrible rap music wasn’t enough to wake them. Nobody was fighting, nobody was fornicating, nobody was doing much of anything. There was nothing about this sorry shindig that set it apart from many others just like it which were still to come, but it sticks in my mind now for a melancholy reason: It was the point at which I realized that something was very wrong. What follows is not some hardcore Requiem for a Dream kind of yarn. Different movies apply. My high school experience was plenty Dazed and Confused, but with shades of Trainspotting and maybe a flash of Drugstore Cowboy. It was like The Breakfast Club, if Claire had carried Percocet in her purse and the dope in Bender’s locker had been white, not green. This is a story about how a kid who enters high school as a Led Zeppelin-loving pothead can leave four years later with a needle sticking out of his arm. (Or not leave at all). It is a tale of a town and a generation held hostage by Purdue pharma — the story of every place on the edge of a big East Coast city flushed with cheap heroin and prescription pills in the mid-to-late aughts. Maybe you already know how it goes. 
Fifteen miles north of Philadelphia’s City Hall sits Hatboro. It is a majority-white town with an average per capita income of $35,000 per year. A set of train tracks dissecting the town can shoot you into the city in a few minutes and for a couple of bucks. My elementary school, Crooked Billet, was named after a Revolutionary-era battle that took place on its grounds on May 1, 1778. Every year on that day kids don tricorn hats and sing songs about America. The town is part of a larger school district encompassing a neighboring township called Horsham, which gets much wealthier as it creeps closer to Philadelphia’s Main Line. In high school, some kids lived in McMansions and drove new cars, others took the bus. The public schools were good. I was raised, along with a younger brother and sister, by a single mom who worked as a hairdresser and a waitress. I spent every other weekend with my father, who lived in the next town over and founded a tree and landscaping company and later worked in real estate. We qualified for the free lunch program at school, and some years were tougher than others, but we were not poor and always had everything we needed. One week every summer was spent on vacation in Wildwood, New Jersey. I began my career as a busboy in an Italian restaurant when I was fourteen and kept the job all through high school. Later I became the first person in my family to go to college. It started off as your regular suburban experience, innocent enough. I smoked my first cigarette on the same day as my first toke of pot, in the last week of eighth grade. The cigarette was a Marlboro Red, provided by a friend’s older sister whom everyone thought was hot. (Regrettably, I smoke them to this day). Weekends were spent with my three best friends, guzzling Canadian whisky lifted ever-so-gently from a parent’s liquor cabinet and chain-smoking in various parking lots. We were long-haired little gremlins who liked to venture into the city for Warped Tour, Ozzfest, and Marilyn Manson. We loved Cypress Hill and named my friend’s $45 bong “King Zulu.” We hated the rich fucks (that was our term of art for them) who wouldn’t shut up about tie-dying their shirts for the next Dave Matthews concert. Sandwiched between a scrap-metal yard and the Revolutionary-era battleground turned elementary school were the aforementioned train tracks and a pathetic patch of mud and trees we called “the woods.” It was to us what the country club was to that other Pennsylvanian, John O’Hara: a place to get soused and settle scores. A few yards down the tracks lived a homeless Vietnam veteran whom we’d christened “the Bum.” He would walk with us to a local bar to buy forty-ounce bottles of beer — usually Olde English or Steel Reserve — in exchange for a couple of bucks. (Bars in Pennsylvania sell beer-to-go, and many of them still allow you to smoke inside.) My best friend at the time was legendary for being able to down an entire forty in under sixty seconds. We played a clever game called “Edward Fortyhands,” in homage to the Tim Burton movie, in which a forty-ounce bottle would be duct-taped to each hand and use of both your mitts would not be regained until the bottles were emptied. A guy named James at the local Hess gas station would sell us cigarettes underage and one woman who operated the McDonald’s drive-thru traded Newports for dollar-menu items. The world was our malt liquor-soaked oyster. Another hangout was a place we called “Chronic Bay.” (We were heavily into Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” back then.) It was a pond-sized storm drainage ditch located behind a sewage processing plant and an abandoned Sam’s Club that was shielded from view by a tree line. It smelled, literally, like shit, but it was the perfect place to smoke weed and
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