On how the drug dealers operated
All these guys don't like selling heroin. But here's the thing: back in the town where they're from they have been humiliated all their lives. Their jobs are dead-end jobs. They work as bakers, they work as farm boys, they work as butchers – they don't have anything pushing them ahead.
As this business model began to take hold, the effects were immediately seen in the town. People began to do better. They began to build big houses, they began to have nice trucks, nice cars. And all around them young men saw this. They saw that this was a route to real economic progress. One of the strangest things I encountered when I was doing this book was how Levi's 501s were these huge forces in pushing this system across the United States.
They're these very well-made, very expensive jeans. Well, this system was a system for turning cheap heroin into ... stacks of Levi's 501s. The reason was that these dealers very quickly noticed that these addicts they were selling to were fantastic shoplifters.
They would give these guys lists: "I need Levi's 501s this size, this color," because they would then take those jeans back home and act as Santa Claus. It was like this huge redemption: "I left poor. And here I am bringing Levi's 501s for everyone." And there was nothing cooler than walking around town during the fiesta or late at night on a Friday in your beautiful dark, blue Levi's 501s. For a person who comes from the smallest, most humble origins in these towns – that is a narcotic itself.
On the situation today
I think these guys continue to do their job. You rest a bunch in Denver, new guys are there to take their place – this is not a very easy system to eradicate particularly if you have widespread prescription of pills that are creating new addicts, also, every day.
And so families, parents and loved ones of these addicts are just thrown into this nightmare. Whole houses and college savings have been maxed out because the family is trying to find some way of getting this kid off this dope that started with, perhaps, an elbow injury in a football field or something like that. Then they went to a doctor and they got these pills. And the end is four or five years of nightmarish attempts to get rehab for this kid, relapse over and over – it's a tough situation we've kind of painted ourselves into.