Sunday night, I stopped in a gas station in a small town in Illinois to pick up ice. The man in front of me was rather unassuming, probably about 5’8” with tanned skin, cropped hair, jeans and a black sweatshirt. Someone I normally wouldn’t have looked at twice, except — written on the back of his sweatshirt, in big, white, block letters, was the question: Got Narcan?
No other words, no words on the front, nothing else. Just “Got Narcan?” worn casually in the Speedway, just like someone would’ve said “Got Milk?” back in the early 2000s. I didn’t have a chance to strike up a conversation with him, so we can unfortunately only speculate on where he got the sweatshirt, or his purposes of wearing it.
But for me, why it was notable — and why I’m still thinking about it days later — is that it feels like an illustration of how drugs have permeated every corner of life in these small towns, whether you do them or not.
When I was in southern Indiana a few weeks ago, I was one of only a handful of people at the bar on a Thursday night. Walking in the door, the woman behind the bar sized me up and immediately asked for my ID, commenting “you’re not from around here, are you?” as I pulled it out of my wallet. No, I told her, I was just stopping through town.
She laughed and shook her head. “I knew it,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you.”
We started chatting, as it was just us and the owner for the first hour or so I was there. We covered where I was from, what the hell I was doing in a small town like this, where I’d been and where I was going, and then I asked started phishing for the lowdown of the area.
Is the bar normally empty like this? Yes.
Wait, really? Even on the weekends? Yeah, mostly. We’re lucky to make a hundred dollars a day during the week, and maybe $600 on a Saturday. But we give $375 of that to the band that comes in to play.
Well, what do people do instead? Like for fun?
Yeah, for fun. Well, people here mostly just do drugs.
At first I thought she was kidding. Or messing with the outsider, preying on the stereotypes people have about small towns.
But, it turns out, she was very, very serious. This small town, like many I’ve visited throughout Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky so far, have been completely wrecked by drugs. Specifically, meth and heroin. Everywhere I turn, every person I talk to, whether I ask about it or not, drugs seems to come up as a topic of conversation.
It’s not just a headline in these towns, a pang of pity while you read an article in the Wall Street Journal that dissipates when you turn the page.
Instead, it’s deeply personal. I’ve talked with a mother whose daughter got mixed up with heroin despite being a nurse and on a great path, and overdosed a year ago. A bartender whose been clean for a year after getting hooked on crystal meth. A volunteer firefighter whose watched opiates be introduced into the area and wreak havoc across the community.
No one seems to have a good answer on how to solve the problem, or if there is even a solution. They feel stuck, frustrated, hurt, fed up.
But it’s undeniable. People want change.
