Dope

by Thierry Sagnier

In the late summer of 2015, the addicts started dying. They did so quietly, as addicts do, in doorways and emergency rooms and homeless shelters. The ones who were better off died in suburban bedrooms and condos; two died aboard a 50-foot sailboat moored at Washington Marina and one, an accountant for a highly successful dot com startup, passed away in a W Hotel suite w on 15th Street while shooting up with a 14-year-old prostitute.

There are periodic die-offs among the addict population of any large city and they usually occur when a major dealer wants to introduce a new, purer brand of heroine to users. The new product will flood the market, kill of a dozen or so junkies and the addicts will flock to the new and improved high. In such circles, death is considered the ultimate advertisement.

Colin Marsh lives just outside Washington DC. He is a former reporter for the Washington Post, a free lance writer, and the occasional handy man when the rent needs to be paid. He has been attending AA and NA meetings for more than twenty years and has been to many funerals, but the latest series of death among addicts, some of who are friends who have relapsed, is unusual even for an at-risk population. Further, it appears the local police are doing nothing about it; indeed, a regional newspaper story hinted at the fact that politicians are not displeased by the spate of fatalities. When a man Colin once sponsored dies, he decides to investigate.

Willie Bee never had much of a chance. In and out of jail since he was a teen, he came to 12-step programs starting as a youth. A talented musician and songwriter who never even made the small times, Willie’s life was mired in a vicious circle of recovery and relapse. He could be found playing his guitar and singing his sad tunes outside a Virginia Metro station. Days before, Colin had bought him a meal, given him $20 and paid for one night at a local Knight’s Inn, exacting from Willie a promise that the next day, Colin would drive him to a detox center. But the next day, Willie was dead, a half-empty syringe stuck in his neck.

The search for the heroin’s origins takes Colin to the clubhouse of an outlaw motorcycle crew, a meth lab in the basement of an antebellum mansion, a run in with members of the notorious MS13 gang, Washington’s Chinatown, and the horse-farm of an ambitious politician whose addicted son has gone missing. Colin, hired to find the youth, will team up with an unusual ally, Mamadou Dioh, a Senegalese businessman whose youngest brother was destroyed by the killer drug. Together they will discover and stop a campaign enabled by the highest level of government, a nationwide conspiracy to eradicate the millions-strong addict population in the US, using the Washington area as a springboard and testing ground.

Paperback

First published December 22, 2015

About the author

I've been a writer most of my life. I've done a few books, radio, documentaries, online stuff, magazines and newspapers. Can't imagine doing anything else although it's feast or famine, with the emphasis on famine.

Still, writing (and playing music)are the most fun things one can do with pants on.

According to my late mother, I was conceived in an army truck and born on the radio.

Well, almost.

I was actually born in the freight elevator of the American hospital just outside of Paris, France. A rookie policeman delivered me between the third and fourth floor during a rare snowstorm in the City of Lights.

My parents met at the end of World War II. Both were soldiers with the Free French, the breakaway remnant of the French military that refused to surrender to the Germans after the capitulation of France. Their eyes met and that same evening—or so I was told—they consummated their union in a US Army truck. The one-night stand would last a lifetime.

After the war, both found jobs as actors in a soap opera aired on Radio France. My father, who spoke English, portrayed a not-too-bright American GI married to my mother, a wily French maiden. The show was live, wildly popular, and broadcast daily. One evening as they were reciting their lines to the microphones, my mother went into labor. She never quite made it to the delivery room.

My mother was an artist, a musician and an author. My father was a journalist who had studied violin at the Versailles conservatory. I was destined to write or play music. I do both.

My first literary work was an out-and-out theft. I was six years old and envious of a child celebrity, Minou Drouet, a little girl whose poems had been published in French magazines. Her name was on everyone’s lips. She was a genius, an enfant prodige, and the decorated pride of the nation

I decided to be the same. I copied some poems from a book in my parents’ library, appropriated authorship, and proudly showed the works to my mother. She was thrilled and immediately summoned the media. My subterfuge failed and a fiasco ensued. I was seriously chastised and I’m not sure my mother ever really forgave me for not being the wunderkind she thought she deserved.

My family moved to the United States when I was ten. By age sixteen I had written a series of short stories in English—my chosen writing language—on the unfairness of society and the tribulations of being an immigrant. I wrote songs, poetry, essays, fiction, a play, and complicated letters to an imaginary friend who, I think, got bored. One day he left.

I struggled through both American high school and the curriculum of a French lycée. I went on to attend Georgetown University’s Foreign Service School but dropped out when offered a copyboy position with the Washington Post.

In time I became an in-house free-lancer specializing in the nascent hippy movement. I wrote about radicals, Yippies, Black Panthers, drug dealers, thieves and scammers, bikers and rock stars. I was in the newsroom during Watergate. I participated ever-so-slightly in the scandal’s coverage by fielding telephone calls from Martha Mitchell, the demented wife of Richard Nixon’s duplicitous Attorney General, John Mitchell. I left the paper after a noisy disagreement with the then-editor, Ben Bradlee, who did not approve of a story I had written for the Sunday Post about being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.

By then, I had written Bike! Motorcycles and the People Who Ride Them. Harper & Row published it, but unfortunately,