In America by Caitríona Perry

Author:Caitríona Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill Books

Ohio

PREACHER’S WIFE POPS PAIN PILLS IN PRISON

‘Drugs are killing so many people in Ohio that cold-storage trailers are being used as morgues,’ screamed the headline.12 Bodies stored in refrigerated trucks over a weekend. Not at the scene of a large-scale natural disaster. But in Ohio. In America, the ninth wealthiest country in the world. The land of hope and glory. But not so hopeful and glorious if you’re a crime-scene investigator in the Stark County coroner’s office who has to request a cold-storage container to act as an overflow morgue for the weekend because by 3 p.m. on a Friday the bricks-and-mortar morgue is already full.

Ohio is experiencing a drug epidemic. So is much of so-called middle America. You don’t hear a lot about it because none of these towns and cities are high on the tourist radar. No popular TV shows are set in these counties, and the US and international media have been so focused on the reality-TV show that was the 2016 presidential election campaign and the subsequent Trump White House that few resources are expended highlighting these areas.

The local authorities do what they can. Famously, in 2016 the East Liverpool police force, in Ohio, posted photographs on Facebook of two adults, overdosed on heroin, unconscious in a car, with a four-year-old boy sitting in the backseat.13

The police report makes for harrowing reading. At ten past three on a Wednesday afternoon in September, an off-duty police officer was driving in his own car when he noticed the car in front was ‘driving very erratic weaving back and forth in the lane’. Up ahead, children were getting off a school bus, so the car braked hard and skidded to a stop. When the bus pulled away, the car stayed in the middle of the road before ‘drifting … in an angle and stopping’.

The off-duty police officer got out of his car and found a fifty-year-old woman unconscious and turning blue in the passenger seat. The forty-seven-year-old man driving the car just managed to say he was trying to take her to the hospital before he passed out too as he reached to restart the engine.

All the while, the woman’s four-year-old son was sitting in a car-seat behind her. In the photographs he’s wearing a brightly coloured dinosaur T-shirt; he looks confused and afraid.

The city authorities explained they had posted the images because they felt it was necessary to show the other side ‘of this horrible drug’ and to ‘be a voice for the children caught up in this horrible mess’. They said they were ‘well aware’ that some would be offended by the shocking images, but they felt it was ‘time that the non-drug using public’ saw what the authorities were dealing with ‘on a daily basis’. They said they hoped the story of this one little boy could ‘convince another user to think twice about injecting this poison while having a child in their custody’. They added that they were willing to fight the problem ‘until it’s

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