Pill City is a book about a Baltimore City duo who forever changed the opiate game. I picked it up, started reading, and suddenly found that I’d completely finished the entire thing. While not a very long book, the story had a profound impact on me and inspired me to write a letter to the author. As a former opiate addict and a current cannabis prisoner of war, there were times when the subject matter in Pill City left me near tears. A lot of the people reading this who don’t know me in real life, and even a lot who do, probably don’t know about my past struggles with opiate addiction and why this topic is so important to me. The book inspired this writing, and I will refer to some points made in the book, but this post will mostly be about me, my own struggles, and my beliefs. While I love the author, Kevin Deutsch, and his powerful message—I applaud his effort to bring a voice to the countless addicts, especially in areas of cities lost to the public eye—I also feel his conclusions and solutions missed some key points. I strongly recommend anyone reading this to order a copy of the book. You will not be disappointed. 

The book begins during the Freddy Gray riots in 2015. Two 18-year-old black kids come up with a drug distribution scheme that changes the entire industry. They team up with a notorious gang known as the Black Guerrilla Family and proceed to rob drug stores all around the city, taking every opiate they can find. They then come up with an Uber-like app to sell the drugs at discounted prices since all of their inventory is, essentially, cost-free for them. I don’t want to spoil the entire plot, but this initial setup makes for quite a compelling storyline. 

The first reason this book caught my eye is that it takes place in Baltimore, Maryland. I’ve spent nearly the last ten years of my life in South Carolina, but I’ll never be anything but a “Baltimoron.” There’s a special place in my heart for the city I grew up rooting for and living near. Though I lived just outside the county lines growing up, I spent years playing baseball for teams in the heart of the city. As an adult, I lived in both Arbutus and Catonsville in Baltimore County. Baltimore is part of my identity, and despite its struggles, I will always love that city. 

One thing that the book refers to often is that the theft of all these drugs created a “second wave” of opiate addiction that targeted underprivileged communities, mostly of color, and avoided much media or national attention by doing so. I know that as a suburban white guy who did pay attention to drug stories, particularly in Baltimore, I’d heard nothing about this. The reality is that underprivileged communities have been ravished by drug addiction for 40+ years, and until the addiction rates reach white communities, we don’t really pay attention. This is a fact that Pill City does an amazing job of pointing out. 

I was part of the “first wave” of a generational epidemic caused by big pharmaceutical companies such as Purdue Pharma. If you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years, I strongly recommend the Netflix documentary “The Pharmacist” to inform you about how the lab coat cartel runs America. I’d been arrested for marijuana for the first time, and to stay out of jail I needed to attend a drug class once a week. At the time, I knew nothing about drugs; I’d grown up homeschooled and spent more time memorizing Bible verses than I did writing papers or doing normal things high school kids do. And people say calculus is worthless. After my freshman year of college, I tried cannabis for the first time. I loved it then, loved it later, and obviously still love it. When I got arrested, I couldn’t smoke anymore. I still thought of cocaine as a “real drug,” something that belonged in the league of drugs like heroin, but when a friend suggested I take a Percocet, I thought, “A doctor can prescribe this for a toothache! It can’t be that big of a deal.” I could take pills and drink on the weekend, and by the time my Wednesday drug class rolled around, I would be clean. The problem was, of course, that eventually I couldn’t stop taking the pills. I truly believe that if marijuana had been legal, and I didn’t have to worry about a drug test, I would never have tried pills. But I did. 

Fast forward nearly two years. July 28, 2010. My house got raided by the Baltimore County Narcotics Unit. At the time, I was doing three 80-mg Oxycontin pills a day. I never smoked or injected them, but I snorted them and was completely hooked. Luckily, I was trying to get clean at the time, which really meant getting high day-to-day, and I didn’t have any pills left at my house. I had been selling pills to support my habit, and to this day that is one of my life’s biggest regrets. The opiate game is sad. No one is really your friend since you lose all your real friends who can’t do anything but watch you self-destruct. I justified my use because at least I wasn’t stealing from my family or pawning off all my possessions, but I sure as shit was accepting the money from people who did.

I quit cold turkey. I remember spending the night in Towson County Jail, going through withdrawals and scared to death. I remember looking at the walls, reading where people had written their names and numbers, telling whoever landed in that cell after them that they had Oxys for cheap. I found a little heart drawn right by where I laid my head, and I remember thinking that little heart came from a place of hope. There was still hope inside me. I have never done opiates again. 

In August 2010, Purdue Pharma was forced to include an additive to their pills to keep people from being able to shoot or snort them. Drug addicts, being the most ingenious breed on earth—something I continue to learn in prison—still found a way to abuse Oxy, but many more just switched to heroin. That’s when I started losing friends to overdoses, homelessness, and prison. I was one of the lucky few that made it out. I moved to South Carolina, and with my sister’s help, I created a new life for myself. The cool part about moving to a new place is that you get to pick your friends. When you grow up with people, you feel an attachment to them no matter where their lives take them. While I knew plenty of people who did opiates and were addicts, for the most part I kept away from that crowd. That said, I’ll never forget about the friends I lost nor the hopelessness of opiate addiction.

December 6, 2017, my life was changed by opiate addiction again. My girlfriend at the time called me around 3 a.m. to tell me that her mother found her sister dead in her room. The needle was still in her arm. Heroin laced with fentanyl, a drug that has skyrocketed to the forefront of the addiction epidemic. Because I was on federal pretrial, among various other reasons—or excuses, depending on your perspective—I was not able to go to her funeral. The decision not to attend haunts me to this day, and the regret has renewed my passion for helping addicts. While incarcerated, I’ve created a plan for an opiate rehab that also incorporates my belief in the medicinal value of cannabis. This is one of the issues I had with the Pill City.

The fact is, states that have legalized cannabis have seen a decrease in opiate addiction. States who allow patients with chronic pain to use medicinal marijuana have seen a large number choose cannabis over prescription drugs. I can already hear the readers screaming in their minds, “BUT YOU’RE TRADING ONE ADDICTION FOR ANOTHER!!!” Well, isn’t that what we already do? The current treatment for opiate addicts is to prescribe them Methadone or Suboxone, which is a return to the old “a doctor prescribes it; it can’t be bad” mentality. The problem is that both of those drugs are not only addictive, they also take a user trying to get off of them through the same experience as heroin withdrawal would. An even bigger problem is that many addicts simply sell their Methadone and Suboxone to buy heroin for themselves. While I do agree both of those are better options than shooting heroin that could be laced with anything, I don’t see them as a cure.

Looking outside of opiates, let’s take a meth addict who goes to NA meetings, drinks six cups of coffee, and smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. We applaud them for being “clean,” don’t we? Caffeine is arguably more dangerous and just as addictive as THC, the active drug in the cannabis plant. I’m not saying that cannabis isn’t addictive in a habitual way, because I believe it is, but as someone who has had experienced “withdrawal” from both? Opiate addiction and cannabis addiction are simply not in the same discussion. Are there really people out there who would want their child living in an abandoned building and shooting heroin with a shared needle rather than wanting their child to smoke a blunt with their friends? The scenarios are not the same, and one doesn’t lead to the other. It’s time to wake up and see reality. The author of Pill City sees no expanded Methadone and Suboxone programs as the answer, but I think it can help short term. 

Now comes the part where people really start to think I’ve lost it. I’ve been mentioning it in my articles recently, and I know some of you think I’m crazy, but you’ve read this far and might as well hear me out, right? In my opinion, the real answer to the problems Pill City details is to simply legalize, regulate, and tax all drugs. One of the first issues the book brings into play is gang violence, or “street justice” as some call it. People get murdered in cold blood daily because of the money involved in black market illegal drugs. The legalization of cannabis by many states has completely halted the importation of marijuana by the Mexican cartels in this country. I know, I know, always back to marijuana, but this comparison is legitimate. Cannabis legalization shut down that part of their entire market. In states where cannabis is legal, a black market does still exist because the prices of “legal” cannabis have not kept up with the drop in price due to the loss of inherent risk. However, in my experience—and I think the five years I’m serving in federal prison for this exact reason give me the right to voice my opinion—the cannabis game is not full of gun-toting dangerous gangsters like it once was.

It used to be that cannabis was just another drug that made money in the streets. Legalization is changing all of that. I bring this up to show precedence for how legalization can stop dangerous cartels from importing tainted drugs into America, thus taking the money and power away from organized crime in this country. For me, the strongest argument for the legalization of drugs is how vehemently no gang or cartel wants it to happen. I can already hear the “but that would create so many more addicts!” crowd. Not necessarily. States who have legalized cannabis have not seen a drastic rise in the amount of people who use it. People don’t really consider how readily available drugs already are, and when has telling people they can’t do something made them not want to do it? It could be argued that drugs are so alluring for the sheer fact that they are illegal. After the legalization, regulation, and taxation of drugs, we can then take all that money currently going into cartels, gangs, and other organized crime pockets and instead reinvest it into education and rehabilitation.

Pill City continuously brings up the incredibly poor circumstances for low-income, mostly black addicts in this country. Even if they want help, it can take weeks or even months for a bed to open up in a rehab. In the book, a group called “The Interrupters” begins a mission to save addicts in Baltimore. The leader of the group, Marvin Grier, a previous gang member himself, ends up being murdered because his mission is working. By walking the streets, talking one-on-one with addicts, and offering to take them in a van to get immediate treatment, Grier was taking money out of BGF’s pockets. He was paying for the addicts’ treatment with his own money. Meanwhile, the cop in Pill City gives an addict money to buy drugs for information on who is selling. What this book really shows is how the addict is always the one used. Gangs use addicts to fund their enterprises and cops use addicts to fill their prisons.

Think of how we currently view the war on drugs. The idea is that we want to stop people from being addicted to drugs, right? Isn’t that why we throw the evil dealers in prison forever? But let’s examine Pill City. The main officer has spent his entire life dedicated to getting rid of drug dealers. He has his trusty addict he pays for information. The entire organization ends up falling apart, everyone is dead, arrested, or fled somewhere far away. Guess who’s still getting high? Everyone’s still on the same street now run by a different gang. Millions of dollars spent on the investigations, the incarcerations, and the salaries of who knows how many cops, agents, and detectives. The only people that saved any addict lives were the volunteers who walked into gang territory, walked up to an addict, and offered them help instead of drugs or money to buy them. What if we lived in a world where those millions went to build rehabs instead of prisons? What if we lived in a world where people walked up to strangers they’ve never met when they saw them struggling with addiction and offered them help instead of throwing drug dealers in prison only to have three more take his place?

Has throwing me in prison for five years stopped anyone from smoking weed? Did dismantling BGF in Baltimore actually save addicts’ lives? The same addict informants will keep telling on their dealers until they are either killed for it or die from their addictions. In my mind, the cop is no better than the dealer because he isn’t helping anyone, either. The real heroes are The Interrupters who risked their lives to save addicts. Those are the people I would want my tax dollars going to. Our nation needs more rehabs, more mental health treatment, and more health treatment in general. We need parents at home with their kids. We need to incarcerate less and help more. While the legalization, regulation, and taxation of drugs sounds crazy, what is even crazier is how we continue to fight a war that can’t be won. At least in Vietnam we finally decided to pull out; with drugs we’ve been losing since 1984. 

When I get out of prison, I’m going to find the nearest group of “interrupters.” Even though I’m not religious, I do have a heart, and I believe in the approach and the focus these interrupters have on the right things. Shouldn’t we, as a nation, feel a moral obligation to help those of us suffering from addiction? Because it can’t go on the way it has been for decades. We will never end addiction by arresting more dealers. We’ll never even make a dent. Whether you agree with my ideas or not, we should all agree that this isn’t working.

My favorite line from Pill City is similar to what I end with in nearly every post I write: “If we have saved even one life, we have changed the world.”—Marion Grier, R.I.P.