Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy

Author:Beth Macy [Macy, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316430203
Publisher: Little,Brown
Published: 2022-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Garcia administers random drug screens for Olive Branch’s low-barrier (or street outreach) bupe patients, the purpose of which isn’t to prove abstinence but rather to confirm that the medicine Tim prescribes is really being taken and not sold for money to buy other drugs. Some clients sell their Suboxone on the black market, including twenty-seven-year-old Abbie, who’s homeless off and on, and often games the system by waiting till the day before her appointment to take her medicine, so it will appear as if she’s been taking it all along. “Some of them, they’re goddamn chemists,” Garcia said.

Abbie also volunteers at the center, checking people in and making Narcan kits, even when she’s using. Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word SAVAGE, she told me she’d gotten hooked on prescribed pain pills after a car wreck at the age of sixteen. She has a criminology degree from nearby Appalachian State and dreams of writing a memoir called Degrees to Drugs. Garcia deadpanned that she should reverse the title’s order.

She’s won her share of unicorn awards over the past two years, but welcoming Abbie’s contributions is a form of harm reduction, too. Abbie was tweaking hard on methamphetamine the day we met—she kept jumping from one topic to the next before finishing her previous thought. She was processing having Narcanned a fellow user the day before, with the help of Garcia and Mathis, who coached her over the phone. But it took an hour before she could pull the story’s thread to completion. It was like Pulp Fiction meets the childhood ADHD classic, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Estranged from her parents (who had the locks on their house changed to keep her out), Abbie had spent the night before at “that Asian guy’s house,” she told Garcia. There was boyfriend drama, something to do with a “side chick threatening to beat me down like a man,” then another overdose inside a trap house that ended with friends shoving ice down the pants of the guy who overdosed. “Somebody else was conducting that one,” she said, of the overdose reversal.

The day was so stressful, she told Mathis, “I was just like, ‘I want to go somewhere and get high now.’ I was going to kill somebody if I didn’t.”

“I’m glad you didn’t!” Mathis said cheerfully.

Most Olive Branch staffers call Mathis “Mama Bear,” and she pretends not to like it. “Whenever we’re having a bad day or going through guy problems, she really guides us in the right direction,” Maloney, the peer, explained as she drove me on her weekly route through Lincolnton. She pointed out places where she’d first recruited participants. “I would sit there by the courthouse and wait on people I thought looked like me.”

Asked what she meant, she said she looked for people who “weren’t real bougie-looking. Like when you see somebody with face tats or street clothes.” Maloney has a broken-heart tattoo underneath one eye and a gang symbol from her former life under the other, but she usually covers them with makeup.

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