When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs

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Hath God Forsaken Me? –

MARCH/APRIL 2019 ISSUE – It was early 2017, and Brianne, a 20-year-old from a woody Atlanta suburb, had come to South Florida to leave her heroin addiction behind. At a residential facility called Recovery Villas of the Treasure Coast, she was approached by a charismatic guy I’ll call Daniel, a Pennsylvania native six years her elder. He could relate to her troubles—he’d struggled with addiction himself—and he could get her into another rehab after Recovery Villas. He would even pay her: $1,000 for the first week of her stay and $500 each week thereafter. That money could buy Brianne a whole lot of heroin. Brianne, whose full name has been withheld to protect her privacy, could be a poster child for the opioid crisis: a blond, green-eyed former softball star who experimented with pills from the medicine cabinet with her high school boyfriend and within a few years was plunging needles into her veins. In 2016, she broke down and admitted to her mom, a software executive named Jen, that she needed help. They made a plan: Brianne would go to treatment for a few months, sober up, and then return home to study at Chattahoochee Technical College.