A few summers ago, Debra Brewer, the chief of the Portsmouth Police Department in southern Ohio, walked outside of the station and found a man sitting on the steps, crying. All he had with him was a bag of clothes.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Brewer asked.
He’d been staying at a drug recovery facility in Kentucky, the man told her, when the employees put him in a car with all of his belongings and drove him to Portsmouth. They left him there on the steps of the police station with no way back home, he said.
“I was mad,” Brewer told me. She called the rehab center and yelled for them to “stop dropping your clients off in my city.”
But this kind of thing happens in Portsmouth all the time, Brewer said.
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Portsmouth is the largest city in Scioto County. In the early 20th century, it was a bustling metropolis, home to an NFL team and one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the world, with the industry employing nearly 16 percent of the city’s workforce.
But when manufacturing, and later steel production, moved offshore in the late 20th century, Scioto County transformed from an industrial hub into America’s pill mill HQ.
People lined the blocks throughout town, waiting to see doctors who prescribed opioids by the bagful. The government cracked down in the 2010s, leaving thousands of people struggling with addiction and seeking alternatives on the black market. To address the needs of the heavily addicted population, rehabs and recovery centers sprouted all over town. Today, recovery centers are some of the biggest landowners and employers in the county, according to local officials. Scioto—which has about 70,000 residents and is among the poorest counties in Ohio—boasts more recovery beds per capita than any other county in the state, based on an analysis by The Free Press. Neighboring towns and states have taken to busing in their addicts for treatment. And once they’re there, they often don’t leave.
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