Opioid addicts populate our prisons, death rows and your neighborhood
Listen to this articleAddicts hooked on pain pills or “opioids” overpopulate our country’s prisons and death rows — particularly in Alabama. As Anne Hull’s revealing article for The Washington Post (“The lonely road of staying clean: In a town where pills are currency opioid addicts have few options,” June 11) describes, “[d]octors in Alabama prescribe more opioid painkillers than physicians in any other state in the nation.”
Saucily noting that Walker County, Alabama, “is usually nowhere to be found in the pages of The Washington Post,” Ryan Ray of Alabama Today reported, “… the rural county one hour away from Birmingham was front and center in a long-form story about a family torn asunder by pill mills and opioid addiction.””
Ray writes that The Washington Post story, “details in depth the suffering of thousands of mostly white, low-income Alabamians resigned to life that revolves around the cycle of drug abuse, poverty, and recovery.” The pills that these profiteering quack-M.D.s in rural Alabama have over-prescribed, Hull writes, “are so enmeshed in the local economy that they’re traded for lawn mowers and school clothes.”
In poor, agrarian areas of Alabama, where manual labor and minimum wage mete out subsistence — where the best paying jobs are at a plant or a prison, and where pills are interchangeable with money — it’s not hard to see how opioid addiction-related crime seeps into (or is directly implicated) in death penalty cases. Hull’s article, though it does not mention capital punishment, does note: “Two generations of prescription painkillers have changed the way people die here. Even more they have changed the way people live. Great-grandparents are now raising the children of addicted parents and grandparents. Four out of five arrests in the county are drug-related.”
When I worked in Alabama between 2012 and 2015 representing poor folks sentenced to die (as an assistant federal public defender), a recurring commonality among my cases and those of my colleagues — as well as other lawyers representing clients on the state’s death row — was opioid addiction. Nothing has changed. Indeed, in the office where I worked in Montgomery, we had psychopharmacologists and neuropsychopharmacologists (try saying those tongue twisters three times in a row) on speed dial.
We’d hire these specialized experts all the time to help illuminate how opioid addiction, often generational in Alabama as Hull’s article poignantly notes, should mitigate a client’s sentence — usually, to LWOP, an overly-benign acronym for life without the possibility of parole. Off of the top of my head I can think of a panoply of people facing execution — right now in Alabama — where opioid addiction either directly, or indirectly, played a part in the crime that put them on death row.
In the story of Jessica Kilpatrick’s struggle with opioid addiction that Hull’s article zones in on, Kirkpatrick’s addiction began when she was over-prescribed pain pills (330 pills a month) for a volleyball injury. Similarly, I worked on a death penalty case in Alabama where my client grew up in a county no different than the one where Kirkpatrick lives; the hardscrabble downtown area where my client went to school and where all local commerce took place was literally awash in prescription pain pills.
The richest man in town was the pharmacist. His pharmacy was immediately adjacent to a “pain management clinic” that dispensed hydrocodone (an opioid) by the armful to my client, and before that, to my client’s grandmother, aunts, uncles, and parents. This particular pharmacist, apart from owning one of the biggest, most expensive houses in town, had his last name carved into the local high school football stadium; that’s a big-deal-statement of power in small-town Alabama.
It was in that very high school football stadium, during practice and in a game, that my client was knocked unconscious, developing back and other health problems as a result. Guess where he went for help to manage the pain? In February, I wrote “why Flint’s water crisis should give death penalty supporters pause,” and how “unacceptable racial bias persists in capital punishment.”
This time, though, the reason I humbly beseech the United States to stop “tinkering with the machinery of death”: Massive, long-standing societal addiction to opioids — a problem that is especially nefarious and pervasive in the hills, hamlets and countryside of Alabama — and in the stories of its death row population.
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Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. His twitter is: @SteveCooperEsq