The Washington Post National Weekly - June 10, 2018

SUNDAY, JUNE 10, 2018

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Unintended consequences Inside the fallout of America’s crackdown on opioids PAGE 12

Politics Democrats avoid primary pitfalls 4

Nation Drugs slip through wall 8

5 Myths Marriage 23

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CASHMERE IS PET-FRIENDLY AGAIN

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POLITICS

Want a pardon? Go on cable TV. BY

J OHN W AGNER

U

nder President Trump, cable television is rapidly becoming the government’s new pardons office.

On Thursday, former CIA officer John Kiriakou became the latest person to take to the talk-show circuit, making a direct appeal to the president to wipe clean his conviction for leaking the identity of a fellow CIA officer.

“I would be forever indebted to him for a pardon,” Kiriakou said during an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Fox News, a program that Trump often watches as part of his morning routine.

Kiriakou was charged in 2012 with leaking classified information about the CIA waterboarding of an al-Qaeda suspect at a secret site in Thailand. He argued Thursday that he was unfairly targeted by former CIA director John Brennan, who has since become a vocal critic of Trump’s actions related to the Russian investigation and other matters.

“He sees an injustice, and he corrects it,” Kiriakou said of Trump.

Traditionally, people seeking pardons apply through the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which reviews thousands of cases and advances some to the White House for the president’s consideration.

But in recent weeks, Trump has shortcircuited that process, granting clemency in cases that have come to his attention from political allies and celebrities.

The most recent was that of Alice Marie Johnson, a woman serving a life term for

KLMNO WEEKLY

CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, seen in 2012, appealed on TV for President Trump to pardon him for leaking classified info.

nonviolent drug offenses. Trump commuted her sentence on Wednesday after an appeal from reality television star and socialite Kim Kardashian West.

The new dynamic has created an incentive

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 35

for pardon-seekers and their allies to appeal directly to the president over the tube.

After Trump floated the possibility of commuting the prison sentence of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, his wife, Patti Blagojevich, appeared on another Fox News show, “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” to plead her husband’s case.

“You know, our system of government has got a system of checks and balances for a reason,” she told the show’s host, Jeanine Pirro. “And sometimes, the courts and these prosecutors get it wrong whether maliciously or just by accident, and it takes a strong leader like President Trump to right those wrongs.”

Her husband is serving a 14-year sentence for convictions in 2010 related to trying to sell President Barack Obama’s Senate seat, among other campaign finance violations.

The wife of former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos has also made TV appearances in which she has said Trump should pardon her husband, who pleaded guilty in October to lying to the FBI about Russia contacts during the campaign. Papadopoulos is awaiting sentencing on the felony charge.

“He believed in Trump, and I believe in Trump having access to information and awareness now to know that he deserves a pardon,” Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos said on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

On Friday, Trump said he may pardon boxer Muhammad Ali, though the Supreme Court overturned his conviction related to the draft in 1971. n ©The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY TRENDS BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Kenyon Stewart has suffered from chronic pain ever since a hip surgery. He relies on opioids for pain management, but it has become almost impossible get them. PHOTO BY BONNIE JO MOUNT, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

A blue boost in fight for House B Y M ICHAEL S CHERER

H

alfway through the primary season, election results across the country have strengthened the Democrats’ hand in their quest for control of the House, even as shifts in the national mood raise the possibility that an anticipated electoral wave could flatten into a ripple.

After votes in 21 states, including California and seven others that held primaries Tuesday, Democrats have avoided potential pitfalls and secured generalelection candidates in many Republican-held districts who have compelling biographical stories and political profiles that party leaders hope will have broad appeal in a nation that tends to vote for change in off-year contests.

Many of the Democratic nominees are younger, more diverse and less tied to Washington than their GOP rivals.

Fresh evidence of the party’s primary success came Tuesday, when Democrats on California’s “top two” ballot succeeded in salvaging spots for several House seats that are considered tossups. Party leaders had feared divided Democrats would cede the seats to Republicans, but voters rallied sufficiently to push Democrats forward to November.

Republicans are counting on an improving economy and the local roots of their incumbents, buttressed by a financial advantage among outside fundraising groups.

Their fears of an electoral catastrophe in November have been eased by declining concern among voters about the direction of the country and rising approval ratings for President Trump, who continues to dominate the daily news cycle by embracing polarizing issues such as immigration, criticism of federal law enforcement and the racially fraught topic of National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem.

But that appears to have been

ALEX SLITZ/LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER /ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Democrats have limited internal divisions and candidates deemed to be strong challengers offset by the Democratic results so far.

“They have enough seats in play and enough quality candidates in those seats to win the majority,” said Nathan Gonzales, who handicaps House races for Inside Elections. “Democrats have done a good job of turning enthusiasm into a large number of candidates, of turning enthusiasm into fundraising,” Gonzalez said. “But now they have to turn that enthusiasm into votes because that is what is going to matter in November.”

Voters have cast primary bal-

lots in 32 of the 56 Republicanheld House districts most vulnerable to a Democratic takeover, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Of the 28 races that had been called by midweek, Democratic women have won in half the districts.

The party’s nominees in these crucial districts also include six military veterans and seven nominees who are black, Latino or Asian.

The winners include new political stars such as Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot running in Lexington,

Democrat Amy McGrath, right, celebrates her victory over Jim Gray in Kentucky's 6th Congressional District primary election on May 22.

McGrath will face Republican Rep. Andy Barr in November.

Ky., and Mikie Sherrill, a Navy pilot and former prosecutor running in northern New Jersey.

Democrats also have benefited from a rare unity between the party’s wings. A predicted liberal Democratic rebellion has not materialized at the polls, in part because mainstream candidates have shifted to the left on policy.

Liberal activists have defeated an establishment-backed candidate in only one congressional race this year, for a House district that includes much of Omaha.

At the same time, several key establishment recruits have easily sailed to victory, including moderate New Jersey Democrat Jeff Van Drew, a state representative who voted against legalizing same-sex marriage and raising the minimum wage. Like Van Drew, many of the recruits appear more palatable to the

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POLITICS

RACHEL LEATHE/BOZEMAN DAILY CHRONICLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

general-election audience in their districts.

“The pieces are set. So now it is how these things play out,” said Jefrey Pollock, a Democratic pollster at the Global Strategy Group, which has been working on congressional races. “The Democrats have done what they need to do to be in the position to have that wave happen if it comes.”

Democratic leaders continue to coach their candidates to steer clear of the fireworks surrounding Trump and the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race, both to reinforce their focus on local concerns and to avoid riling Republican voters.

“Our candidates aren’t talking about him a lot. Republicans are having to explain about the president,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), who leads the Democrats’ House midterm effort.

“Our candidates and our colleagues are traveling around the country talking about the economy.”

Democrats need a net gain of 23 seats to retake the House and have benefited from a playing field that is largely located in the suburbs of major American cities, where polls show swing voters, especially educated white women, are more likely to reject Trump’s conduct in office. Strat-

egists consider only five Democratic seats, including two in Minnesota, vulnerable to a Republican takeover.

Republicans have been circulating white papers that suggest the political environment may not be as favorable as Democrats think. A document distributed by the Hohlt Group, a Republican lobbying firm, cites Republican statewide primary turnout in states such as Indiana, Ohio and Texas that was far higher than Democratic turnout, though the number of Democratic ballots cast in key House districts in those states rose more steeply than for Republicans, who did not have competitive primaries.

The numbers are seen as a possible measure of Republican enthusiasm in the fall.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC focused on House races, has highlighted the growing number of Americans who say the country is going in the right direction.

The right-direction level of about 39 percent in polling averages is considerably better than in recent wave-election midterm years, such as 2004, 2006 and 2010.

Trump has latched onto any evidence of resurgence, even if flimsy. On Wednesday, he touted a Republican candidate’s second-

Kathleen Williams, a candidate for the Democratic nomination to U.S. House, attends a primary watch party Tuesday in Bozeman, Mont. Williams was the top vote-getter among the Democratic candidates and will face Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte in November.

place finish in the race for governor of California. (Trump’s endorsement was credited with boosting John Cox, a little-known business executive.)

“Great night for Republicans!

Congratulations to John Cox on a really big number in California,” Trump tweeted. “. . . So much for the big Blue Wave, it may be a big Red Wave. Working hard!”

Also in California’s Tuesday elections, a weak showing by Republicans locked them out of the November U.S. Senate race, and Democrats overcame concerns that they would lose spots on the fall ballot in several important House races.

Trump’s approval rating as measured by Gallup has improved in recent months, peaking at 43 percent in mid-May after spending much of December and January in the mid-30s.

However, it remains in a danger zone for midterm elections, which tend to be referendums on the president. The share of Americans who strongly disapprove of the Trump remains higher than the historic norm, suggesting enthusiasm that could materialize this fall for Democratic candidates.

Yet the improving economic outlook appears to be having some effect on partisan sentiment, putting in question the depth of the Democratic advantage. Late last year, an average of public polls showed Democrats had at least a 10-point advantage when voters were asked a generic question about whether they wanted to vote for an unnamed Democrat or unnamed Republican for Congress. That margin dropped to six points by the end of May. Those numbers have caused confusion among some Democratic pollsters who are uncertain whether the trend will continue. Many Republicans believe that the landscape is not as dire as the one suggested by recent special-election results, including Democrat Conor Lamb’s March victory in a Republican district outside Pittsburgh, which came despite a massive advertising blitz by Republicans and repeated visits by Trump and his aides.

“If the election were held today we would keep control of the House,” said Corry Bliss, who is running the Congressional Lead-

KLMNO WEEKLY

ership Fund. The PAC has announced it will spend $48 million in digital and television advertising in 30 districts.

Still, other Republican-held districts could soon be considered out of the GOP’s reach.

Bliss’s group has left some of the most vulnerable Republican seats without televised air cover, at least in the early spending plan.

The group has opted to announce only digital ads in the Chicago area, where Rep. Peter J. Roskam (R-Ill.) is fighting for reelection in a district Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by seven points. The group is also, thus far, sitting out spending in the Northern Virginia district of Rep. Barbara Comstock (R). By contrast, the House Majority PAC, the main Democratic outside group, has reserved $43 million for television spending, including funds for both of those districts.

Democrats are hoping that as Election Day approaches, more Americans see their congressional vote as an opportunity to put a check on unified Republican control in Washington.

“In all of our research, what we have learned broadly is that there is broad support for checks and balance,” Luján said. “What we have also heard from the voters is that while they want candidates who will work for anybody who can help the district, they also want someone who will stand up to the president.”

About a month ago, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg conducted focus groups in Michigan that reinforced the underlying dynamics of the national election landscape. Among white Republican men in Macomb County, he found enormous support for Trump. Black voters in Detroit were energized against the president and his party.

But the swing group that Democrats are depending upon could be found in the affluent suburbs of Oakland County, reflective of the places across the country that will decide control of the House in November.

“College-educated women sounded like a base Democratic group,” Greenberg said. “Trump every day gets up and drives away those voters and gives them a reason to vote.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

The routine: Deny, contradict, admit B Y A SHLEY P ARKER

B

oth President Trump’s legal and political teams were vigorous in their denials: The president had absolutely not dictated a misleading statement on behalf of his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to explain away a controversial meeting he had with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower.

“Apart from being of no consequence, the characterizations are misinformed, inaccurate, and not pertinent,” Jay Sekulow, one Trump’s attorneys at the time, said in response to a Washington Post story last summer that first reported the president’s role in dictating his son’s response.

And from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: “He certainly didn’t dictate, but he — like I said, he weighed in, offered suggestion like any father would do.”

The problem? That wasn’t true.

In a January memo to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, first reported by the New York Times, two of Trump’s then-lawyers — including Sekulow — revealed that the president had, in fact, “dictated a short but accurate response” on behalf of Trump Jr. And on ABC recently, when pressed about the shifting explanations, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani offered an inadvertent window into the White House’s credibility problem, quipping: “I mean, this is the reason you don’t let the president testify.”

The admission that Trump dictated his son’s statement is the latest example of where on a number of key issues — especially pegged to Mueller’s ongoing Russia probe and Trump’s legal difficulties — the White House and Trump’s lawyers have offered contradicting stories and whipsaw about-faces, often revealing the truth weeks later, when confronted with their inconsistencies.

“One of the challenges right now is to disentangle these versions, some of which have come to us directly through the president, some of which have come to us through very good reporting, and some of which reflect the inner

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump Tower meeting provides latest example of inconsistent accounts coming from White House defense of the Trump legal team,” said Tim Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University.

“I believe that the initial stories emerged when this was a oneman presidency. Now there’s more of a legal team that’s trying to protect him from his own words.” The result, Naftali added, can be dizzying.

“I think his team is trying to come up with a theory to explain all of these Trump exhortations in a way that doesn’t make him seem guilty of obstruction of justice, and that requires strenuous verbal gymnastics,” he said.

The obfuscation began before Trump officially took office, amid reports that his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had potentially inappropriate contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions against Moscow.

Amid the first wave of news

stories, Sean Spicer, press secretary at the time, vigorously denied the reports, saying Flynn had merely “reached out” to Kislyak on Christmas Day to wish him “a merry Christmas and a happy new year,” and then again several days later to begin setting up a call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Vice President Pence appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in mid-January to unequivocally deny that Flynn had done anything wrong. Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak, Pence said, “had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.” (When The Post first reported in February that Flynn had privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak during Trump’s transition, the Pence team said Pence was not lying and had simply been misled).

Flynn also publicly denied he

This past week, when asked about a denial she had earlier made, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeatedly referred the media’s questions to the president’s outside counsel, prompting one exasperated reporter to say, “But in August, you said it.”

had discussed sanctions with Kislyak and twice told The Washington Post “no” when asked in an interview if he had ever done so.

Despite having been briefed by Justice Department officials that Flynn misled senior administration officials about his conversations with Kislyak and could be a blackmail risk a full two weeks prior, the White House continued to defend him — and took no steps to remove him — until the news broke in the press.

Flynn then resigned — punishment, White House officials said, for misleading Pence. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump also seemed to offer conflicting stories about why he fired then-FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017. When he fired Comey, the president said in a letter that he was letting the FBI director go because of Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server.

Yet two days later, he suggested to NBC’s Lester Holt that he had another motive — the FBI director’s role in overseeing a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the election.

“In fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won,’ ” Trump told Holt.

Then, in a tweet last month, the president seemed to contradict his Holt interview, again reversing course and claiming, “Not that it matters but I never fired James Comey because of Russia!”

On Monday, Sanders twice declined to explain her earlier denial — undercut by the president’s lawyers — that Trump had dictated on Air Force One the misleading statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who was expected to provide dirt on Clinton to aid the campaign.

She repeatedly referred the media’s questions to the president’s outside counsel, prompting one exasperated reporter to say, “But in August, you said it.” n ©The Washington Post

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ANALYSIS | POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A party becomes a political football BY

P AUL K ANE

S

en. Robert P. Casey Jr. celebrated two championships for Pennsylvania at the White House in May 2009, first the Philadelphia Phillies and then the Pittsburgh Steelers after their respective baseball and football titles.

Last fall, after the Pittsburgh Penguins won hockey’s Stanley Cup, Casey tried to make it again but scheduling conflicts kept him away.

Casey didn’t care who was presidential master of ceremonies, Democrat Barack Obama or Republican Donald Trump. He just liked the civic nature of the gatherings. Which is why he had every intention of attending Tuesday’s planned celebration of the Philadelphia Eagles’s Super Bowl victory.

“It’s good for the country to have these kinds of celebrations.

The community, or the state they’re from, the people appreciate it,” the Democrat said in a Tuesday interview.

Instead, Casey boycotted the White House after Trump canceled the Eagles event over a dispute about how many players would attend.

“It’s just tragic,” he said.

That may sound like an overstatement, but in Washington these annual celebrations have been among the few remaining feel-good events that bring all sides together for a common cause. Jokes are told, the president gets a ceremonial gift of the winning team’s uniform and everyone applauds.

Washington, it seems, can’t have nice things anymore.

The clash centers on Trump’s ongoing feud with National Football League players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and allegations of police brutality toward minorities. While no Eagle ever took a knee during their championship season, the team produced some of the league’s loudest voices on issues of race, leading many players to decide they did not want to attend an event hosted by

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Celebrating winning teams — usually a bipartisan event — has become another source of division Trump.

The president and his aides lobbed charges against the team for abandoning their fans. Trump took aim at the NFL’s new standard that would allow players to stay in the locker room if they wanted to protest the anthem.

Then he oversaw a 10-minute, selfproclaimed “Celebration of America” on the South Lawn on Tuesday.

There were no Eagles players, no coaches. Owner Jeffrey Lurie was back in Philadelphia.

Just two members of Congress attended, Reps. Mike Kelly and Lou Barletta, both Republicans whose Pennsylvania districts are nowhere near Philadelphia.

Trump used some of his four minutes of remarks to promote Barletta’s candidacy in the Senate race against Casey.

Military bands performed the national anthem and “God Bless America.” There was some applause, Trump shook a few hands.

The event served as a partisan end to a storybook season for a team that had to use its backup quarterback throughout the playoffs and Super Bowl, an underdog image befitting a city and team that had never hoisted the Lombardi Trophy.

It was such a big deal that Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), whose home town is 60 miles north of the Eagles’ stadium, planned to bring his family to the White House to see their team feted as champions.

Toomey said it would have been the first time he went to a sports team celebration at the White House. Instead, he stayed at the Capitol attending to official business and his family stayed home.

“Yeah, I’m disappointed,” Toomey said. He declined to pin the blame on either party, but said canceling was probably the right call once so few players were willing to attend.

“It wouldn’t have been much of an event with a half-dozen play-

A fan wears an Eagles hat after President Trump spoke at the "Celebration of America" event Tuesday that replaced a celebration for the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles that he canceled.

ers,” he said.

These gatherings are supposed to celebrate accomplishment while allowing political figures from that city or state to rub elbows with their sporting heroes.

In June 2016 then-President Barack Obama and Peyton Manning engaged in a public ribbing in celebrating the Denver Broncos’ victory in the previous Super Bowl.

The soon-to-retire president told the crowd about advice he had received from the just-retired quarterback: “Don’t overstay your welcome,” Manning quipped.

Everyone laughed. No one cared that Manning’s own politics are quite conservative and that, a year later, he would be playing golf with Trump.

In March 2005, then-President George W. Bush hosted the Boston Red Sox and a throng of Massachusetts Democrats who wanted to celebrate their historic World Series victory.

“Good to see you,” the president told Sen. John F. Kerry (D), who had just lost the hard-fought 2004 campaign to Bush. “I like to see Senator Kerry, except when we’re fixing to debate. If you know what I mean.”

The crowd burst into laughter, knowing Kerry, even though he came up short at the polls, had been judged the winner of those debates.

Politics have crept into these White House gatherings in the past, usually with just one or two players from a team boycotting.

But Monday’s cancellation, just 20 hours before the small Eagles contingent was set to join Trump, marked a new escalation in the politics of the presidency and sports.

Casey blamed Trump for having “really just inflamed the issue” last fall when he said any player protesting the anthem should be thrown off the field and using a swear word to describe them.

Now, he doesn’t know if any major sports team will come to the White House again.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Casey said. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

A hole in this wall’s success story B Y N ICK M IROFF San Diego

O

n his first visit to California after taking office, President Trump stood a few yards from Mexican territory with a poster showing before-and-after photographs of the border fence.

The older image, from the early 1990s, showed a trampled, denuded hillside with throngs of people crisscrossing a flimsy barrier. In the second, the same area appears today, green after the rains, where tall steel fencing has made a sharp delineation: crowded Tijuana on one side, and a verdant, orderly American landscape on the other.

Rodney Scott, the chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, pointed to the first image and began telling Trump what it was like patrolling in those days, but the president interrupted.

“It was an open wound, frankly,” Trump said. “It was really, really bad. People just pouring across, drugs, everything else pouring across,” he said. “They reestablished law and order in San Diego when they put up a wall. And it’s not a superior wall; it’s an inferior wall. But it’s a wall.”

Once the symbol of America’s broken border, San Diego today is the place Trump and his top Homeland Security officials point to as proof that “walls work.”

The border fencing here, 15 feet tall and topped in some places by concertina wire, has made San Diego one of the most difficult places to cross for illegal migrants along the entire 2,000-mile boundary. Last year, U.S. agents made 26,086 arrests in the San Diego sector, down 96 percent from 1986, when they made 629,656.

Yet recent Homeland Security statistics show that border walls — or tall fences — do not necessarily work in the way the president says. They have been far more effective at stopping people than at stopping drugs.

Trump has promoted a border wall as a solution to the opioid crisis, which was responsible for

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump points to San Diego fencing as a model, but it is by far the biggest gateway for hard drugs 42,000 American deaths last year.

But U.S. seizure data indicates that San Diego, the place with America’s most formidable fencing, has become its principal gateway for hard drugs.

According to figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, seizures of fentanyl in San Diego nearly doubled last year to 139 pounds, enough for nearly 30 million lethal doses. That accounted for more than threequarters of all fentanyl seizures at U.S. border crossings last year.

More heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine come through the San Diego border than anywhere else, statistics show.

Trump traveled to San Diego in March to inspect eight prototypes for the border wall, each a different attempt to realize his campaign promise for a “big, beautiful wall” spanning the Mexican border. He has threatened to shut down the government this fall if

Congress doesn’t provide the money for it, and his administration has boosted its 2019 funding request for the wall from $1.6 billion to $2.5 billion.

Critics say the money would be better spent hiring more U.S. customs officers whose job it is to facilitate trade and travel while stopping narcotics and other threats.

Trump’s border enforcement proposals call for 5,000 more Border Patrol agents and 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, but his plan would do little to address the shortage of customs officers, which has grown so acute that staff are being reassigned from U.S. airports to the Mexico border.

Most of the drugs come directly through U.S. ports of entry — the official border crossings. Smuggling engineers use constantly evolving tactics to hide the contraband in fake vehicle panels,

Rodney Scott, chief of the Border Patrol's San Diego sector, looks out toward Tijuana, Mexico, as some of his agents respond to a call in the distance in San Diego.

secret compartments or deep inside engine parts. Cartel chemists have learned to liquefy meth to make it look like water. And super-potent fentanyl is so compact that pedestrian couriers can walk it through border gates hidden in clothing, shoes or body cavities.

Risk-minded Mexican traffickers view such smuggling methods as far more reliable than sending foot-bound couriers with costly loads through the desert or mountains, where they could get lost, robbed by bandits or captured by U.S. border agents.

They are also playing the odds.

San Diego’s main crossing at San Ysidro, the southern terminus of U.S. Interstate 5, is the busiest land border in the Western Hemisphere, where 70,000 vehicle passengers and 20,000 pedestrians enter the United States each day.

For smuggling high-value narcotics, blending in is a better bet than sneaking around.

While seizures of hard drugs are at record levels — indicating an unprecedented volume of narcotics entering the United States, experts say — arrests of illegal border crossers dropped last year to the lowest level since 1971.

According to a study published last year by the research division of the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. border is more secure than ever, and the cost and difficulty of sneaking in to the United States has increased dramatically.

Nowhere is that change more evident than in San Diego.

San Diego’s border has become the busiest drug crossing in no small part because the Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel controls the narcotics trade on the other side. It remains the most powerful trafficking organization in North America, despite the 2016 recapture of its leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is jailed in New York and awaiting trial. The Sinaloa group defends its dominance over the lucrative Tijuana smuggling corridor, known as a “plaza,” with ruthless, lethal force.

“We know that trafficking pat-

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NATION terns depend on what [criminal organization] controls the plaza,” said Pete Flores, the top U.S. customs official for the San Diego field office.

That leaves Flores’s officers to hunt for needle-in-haystack loads of cocaine, meth and deadly fentanyl.

The synthetic opioid is so potent that customs officers now open suspected drug packages inside a hermetic plastic box they call “the incubator” to avoid inadvertently sending particles airborne that could trigger an overdose.

The most innovative traffickers are experimenting with drones and other airborne techniques to fly smaller loads over San Diego’s border fences, and tunnels remain a constant threat. But Flores and others say the biggest challenge is still detecting drug loads hidden among the thousands of vehicles coming across roundthe-clock.

The officers rely on drug dogs and tried-and-true techniques, scanning cars for suspicious alterations: screws that look too new, stitching that looks too clean, gas tanks that make a thud when they’re tapped, suggesting something solid inside.

The shortage of officers is a strain. “We have to have enough people to facilitate trade and travel, but also to do proper enforcement,” Flores said. “Balancing those two things, with our current staffing, makes it challenging for us.”

At the Otay Mesa crossing, the second-busiest in the San Diego area, customs officers have turned a small storage shed into an informal museum where trainees can see samples of smugglers’ ingenuity.

There were oxygen tanks with false compartments for meth and cocaine, and modified construction equipment with hollow panels whose welds had been masked by sprayed-on dirt, as if applied by a makeup artist.

Then there were the “fish tanks,” airtight compartments built into fuel tanks. When tapped by officers’ probes, they sound normal, with liquid sloshing around. But each had room for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of narcotics, able to deliver loads across the border again and again. n ©The Washington Post

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Rat packs: Populations are rising, and sticking together BY

B EN G UARINO

W

elcome to the age of the urban rat. There are about 2 million New York City rats, a 2014 estimate suggested, which would mean the rodents in New York outnumber the humans in Philadelphia. Do not discount the power of gnawing teeth in aggregate — Cornell University scientists once calculated rats cause $19 billion in damage annually. Rats and other rodents directly transmit 11 diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they help spread a dozen more.

“It seems to be the urban rat populations are becoming worse than they were,” according to Jason Munshi-South, a biologist at Fordham University and the coauthor of a new study on city rat populations, published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Climate change pushes the thermometer in the rat’s favor, he said. So does a renewed interest in urban living. More city-dwellers means more food, more shelter and more resources for rats.

Because of this increased rodent presence — and new biological tools — scientists have recently begun to address rat populations more scientifically.

Rats have lived within our shadows for centuries. Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus, crossed the Atlantic aboard European ships in the 1700s.

In the new report, the biologist and his colleagues mapped the genetics of rats in four cities: New Orleans, New York, Vancouver and the Brazilian city of Salvador.

The researchers captured at least 150 rats in each city, snipped off a bit of tissue and probed the samples for 15,000 genetic markers.

By tracing subtle differences in mutations among rat populations, the scientists identified where different rat families had clustered.

The resolution of the study “is so high it can add landscape fea-

tures,” said Michael H. Kohn, an evolutionary biologist at Rice University in Texas who was not affiliated with the new study.

Though previous researchers have looked at genetic diversity of city rats, it “wasn’t possible at this level before,” Kohn said.

Last November, Munshi-South and company published a paper

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

In New York, scientists found that uptown and downtown rats were separate populations,

that described the relationship of rat colonies in New York City.

They found that uptown and downtown rats are separate populations, divided by a relatively inhospitable (to rats) commercial district in midtown Manhattan.

That work suggested a barrier to genetic flow across the middle of the city — where rats won’t travel, neither do their genes.

The new work confirmed the “uptown” and “downtown” Big Apple rats, and also located DNA divides in the three other cities.

Rats in New Orleans’s French Quarter were genetically distinct from the rats in the Lower Ninth Ward. A canal appeared to carve the city into eastside and westside rats.

In Salvador, rats split into “basically a northern group and a southern group,” Munshi-South said, separated by a rat-free valley.

In Vancouver, the authors un-

covered a pocket of rats in the southeast with particularly tight genetic ties. “We think that the major highways are causing that pocket,” he said.

The study was a beautiful example of “landscape genetics,” Kohn said. At the widest regional level, the overall rates of genetic diversity were not so different from city to city. But local blockto-block patterns became apparent, like scrolling from a fuzzy satellite image on Google Maps into detailed street photos.

Munshi-South said the scientists have to be “kind of circumspect” when identifying a given feature as a barrier to gene flow.

Future work will pool physical features, as well as human demographic and economic data, to determine what restricts rats from moving.

But one result from the paper was clear — related rats tend to stick together. In New York and New Orleans, rats showed the highest genetic correlation within 500 yards of one another, beyond which rates of shared DNA dropped precipitously.

Marc Johnson, a biologist at the University of Toronto, said the study marked a major advance in rat ecology as well as evolution in urban areas.

“Their finding that rats are more genetically related at small distances, and that both human made and natural barriers limit the movement of rats, may have important implications for the control of rat populations in cities,” Johnson said.

Whether rats live in American cities for the next 300 years depends on us, Munshi-South said.

If our cities develop more intensely, becoming denser and interconnected, he suspects the rats will follow suit.

“It depends on what choices we make about how we build the landscape and how dense we get and how good we are at managing garbage,” he said. “That’s always the key with rats.” n ©The Washington Post

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In Venezuela, a punishing brain drain B Y A NTHONY F AIOLA AND R ACHELLE K RYGIER Caracas, Venezuela

A

n unruly 9-year-old bolted from his classroom, prompting a volunteer teacher to chase him down the hall. He would normally be hauled straight to Romina Sciaca’s office. But the guidance counselor was gone — part of a wave of staffers to flee Aquiles Nazoa Elementary School.

This collapsing socialist state is suffering one of the most dramatic outflows of human talent in modern history, with Aquiles Nazoa offering a glimpse into what happens when a nation begins to empty out. Vast gaps in Venezuela’s labor market are causing a breakdown in daily life, and robbing this nation of its future.

The exodus is broad and deep — an outflow of doctors, engineers, oil workers, bus drivers and electricians.

And teachers.

So far this year, 48,000 teachers — or 12 percent of all staff at elementary and high schools — have quit, according to Se Educa, an educational nonprofit group.

The vast majority, according to the group, have joined a stampede of Venezuelans leaving the country to escape food lines and empty grocery store shelves.

At Aquiles Nazoa — a school named after an ill-fated poet — Sciaca was the first to go, heading for Chile a year ago. Reinaldo Cordero quit a few months later, leaving behind his second-grade class and a salary that hyperinflation had shrunk to a black-market worth of around $29 a month.

Esperanza Longhi — who also taught second grade — quit in February. She’s at home, packing for Peru. To get there, she’ll go through Ecuador — the same country where Maryoli Rueda, who used to teach third grade, recently moved.

Principal Deliana Flores has tried and failed to find qualified replacements. As teachers leave, some grades in schools have gone months without classes. At Aquiles Nazoa, the third grade

WIL RIERA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A broad, deep exodus causes a breakdown in the daily life of the collapsing socialist country stayed home for two weeks. Desperate, Flores is plugging holes with unpaid volunteers — basically school moms such as Kory Hernandez, 24.

But it isn’t really working.

Hernandez dragged the 9-year old back into the classroom by his shirt sleeve, then sunk into her seat and sighed.

“Quiet,” she said, as her class erupted in open rebellion .

“Please,” she pleaded. “How are you ever going to learn?”

Think of Venezuela like one big factory where the societal assembly line no longer works — partly because there are fewer and fewer people to run it.

During the first five months of the year, roughly 400,000 Venezuelans have fled the country, following 1.8 million who left over the last two years, according to the Central University of Venezuela.

Yet even those numbers may not

fully capture the scope of the exodus. Aid workers dealing with the crisis in bordering nations say an average of 4,600 Venezuelans a day have been leaving since Jan. 1 — putting the outflow during this year alone at nearly 700,000.

The Venezuelans are running from a nation broken by failed socialist policies, mismanagement, corruption and lower global oil prices — the country’s principal source of cash.

“It’s not just about a few doctors leaving anymore,” said Tomas Páez, a migration expert at the Central University of Venezuela.

“It’s about [understaffed] hospitals closing down whole floors.”

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans began leaving the country following the rise of left-wing firebrand Hugo Chávez, who became president in 1999. But in the past year, Venezuela’s economy has fallen off a cliff, prompting a more

Kory Hernandez fills in as a teacher at Aquiles Nazoa Elementary School in Caracas. As droves of teachers have left Venezuela, some grades in the nation’s schools have gone months without classes.

drastic exodus.

Experts say the outflow is set to surge in the aftermath of the reelection of President Nicolás Maduro on May 20. Denounced internationally as illegitimate, the election removed any real chance for change.

Amid food shortages, hunger is pervasive and growing in a country that was once Latin America’s richest per capita. Without medicines, treatable diseases such as HIV and malaria have become rampant.

The value of local salaries is falling by the day. In the middle of 2017, an average teacher’s salary was worth nearly $45.

Today, it’s worth about $8.

“If we continue like this, Venezuela won’t even be a Third World country anymore,” said Flores, the school principal.

Massive gaps in the labor force are undercutting critical services here. Inside the darkened halls of a Caracas subway station on a recent afternoon, for instance, passengers climbed broken escalators and filed past closed ticket booths. The conditions reflect the shrunken workforce; last year, 2,226 subway employees — more than 20 percent of the staff — abandoned their posts, according to Familia Metro, a Caracas-based transit watchdog group.

“There’s a huge lack of people in operations and maintenance now,” said Ricardo Sansone, head of Familia Metro. “They have no people to sell tickets at many stations, so passengers are often not even paying to use the subway.”

This year, thousands of blackouts have hit Venezuela, darkening cities for weeks at a time. A lack of imported spare parts to fix the poorly maintained power grid is one problem. But so is “the flight of our trained workers,” said Aldo Torres of the Electricity Federation of Venezuela, an association of labor unions.

“Every day, we’re receiving dozens of calls from colleagues saying they’re going to Colombia, Peru and Ecuador,” Torres said.

“They’re being replaced by people who are mostly not qualified.” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

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The price of being a Saudi feminist BY

L OVEDAY M ORRIS

I

t was just days before Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s March visit to the United States when Loujain al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia’s most high profile feminists, was stopped by security officers as she drove on a highway near her university in Abu Dhabi.

The 28-year-old was taken from her vehicle and spirited away to her home country on a plane.

Hathloul spent several days in prison before being released, and she was banned from using social media or leaving the country as the Saudi heir apparent embarked on his marathon threeweek public relations blitz in the United States, where he met with President Trump as well as Oprah Winfrey and others.

The activist’s rendition from the United Arab Emirates, where she was studying for a master’s degree, highlights the contradiction between Saudi Arabia’s public relations campaign touting reform and the reality on the ground for those asking for basic rights for women.

It also demonstrates the close cooperation between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which together have promoted a model in the region that prioritizes stability and economic development while harshly suppressing political activism.

The details of Hathloul’s forced return were recounted by people with knowledge of the incident, who were granted anonymity because they fear reprisals. Authorities in Riyadh did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite apparently complying with Saudi Arabia’s attempts to silence her — Hathloul’s last tweet to her 316,000 followers was March 12 — she was arrested again last month in what appeared to be a particularly brutal crackdown on female activists in the kingdom.

A total of seven Saudis were detained — five women and two men who had supported their

LOUJAIN AL-HATHLOUL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

One of the nation’s most high-profile activists is no stranger to detention — and she is not alone cause, including a lawyer who had represented Hathloul in the past. They were accused of crimes including “suspicious contact with foreign parties” and undermining the “security and stability” of Saudi Arabia, and they have been publicly vilified in progovernment media in what activists have described as a vicious smear campaign.

“Loujain should be celebrated now,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi writer in selfimposed exile in the United States. “This is so unneeded right after the huge effort that MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] made in the United States, presenting himself as a reformer.”

Hathloul’s activism focused on women being allowed to drive and on ending the country’s restrictive male guardianship system, which meant women required permission from a male relative to access many government services.

The movement had some success and had appeared to be in step with Mohammed’s vision to modernize Saudi Arabia.

The kingdom granted women the right to drive last year and guardianship laws were eased.

Women can now supposedly access government services and open businesses without a man’s permission, though in practice it is still often requested, women say. A guardian’s permission is still required for women to travel or marry.

But the kingdom’s inching reforms have come alongside a clampdown on activists, with an increasingly oppressive environment for those who call for changes. Human Rights Watch described it as having sparked a “frenzy of fear” for those genuinely engaged in reform.

“This arrest campaign is an arrest campaign against feminism in Saudi,” said one female activist who knows some of those

An image from a 2014 video made by Loujain al-Hathloul shows her driving in the United Arab Emirates toward the Saudi border before she was arrested and referred to a terrorism court.

detained. “Even the men who were arrested, they were with us.”

At 2:30 p.m. on May 15, Hathloul’s house was raided and she was arrested in her bedroom, according to Alqst, a Saudi human rights group based in London. She was taken to al-Hair prison, the group said, the same jail where she was held after she was seized in the United Arab Emirates. Those detained have since been transferred to Jiddah, according to human rights groups.

She’s no stranger to detention.

Hathloul rose to prominence in 2014, when she got in her car in neighboring Abu Dhabi and tried to drive across the border to Saudi Arabia. She was arrested and referred to a terrorism court but was released before being tried after 73 days in detention.

The following year she stood in local council elections, after a royal decree allowed women to both vote and run for office.

However, her name was never added to the ballot.

She was detained again in June 2017 after returning from a family visit to the United States.

Her activism has brought her international recognition. But it has come at a cost. Saudi Arabia’s Okaz newspaper reported recently that those arrested could face up to 20 years in jail. They have been publicly branded traitors by pro-government media.

Just hours after the announcement that the driving ban would be lifted in September, women who had campaigned for that right were called and asked to not comment publicly — even positively.

Speaking before the latest round of arrests, one female activist speculated that there could be an “old camp” trying to counter Mohammed’s reforms. Others disputed that, saying he has a complete grip on power.

“There is no old guard,” Khashoggi said. “He is in total control. What’s happening is unprecedented.” It doesn’t represent the “old” Saudi Arabia, he said, but the “new Saudi.” n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

A desperate road to relief from pain T ERRENCE M C C OY Colville, Wash.

BY

T

he morning of the long drive, a drive he took every month now, Kenyon Stewart rose from the living room recliner and winced in pain. He looked outside, at the valley stretching below his trailer, and again wondered whether it was getting time to end it. He believed living was a choice, and this was how he considered making his: A trip to the gun store. A

The race to end the opioid epidemic may be creating a crisis for pain patients

purchase of a Glock 9mm. An answer to a problem that didn’t seem to have one.

Stewart is 49 years old. He has long silver hair and an eighthgrade education. For the past four years, he has taken large amounts of prescription opioids, ever since a surgery to replace his left hip, ruined by decades of trucking, left him with nerve damage. In the time since, his life buckled. First he lost his job. Then his house, forcing a move across the state to this trailer park. Then began a

Kenyon Stewart returns home after running errands.

After losing his job, he lost his big house in a Tacoma suburb and had to move across Washington state to a trailer park, where a relative lets him and his longtime partner live for free.

monthly drive of 367 miles, back to his old pain clinic, for an opioid prescription that no doctor nearby would write.

“It’s 10 after,” reminded Tyra Mauch, his partner of 27 years, watching him limp over to her.

“Got to go,” he said, nodding.

He hugged her for a long moment, outside the bathroom with the missing door, head full of anxiety. He knew what awaited him on the other side of the drive.

Another impossibly difficult conversation with his provider, who,

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COVER STORY scared by the rising number of opioid prescribers facing criminal prosecution, would soon close the pain clinic. Another cut in his dosage in preparation for that day. More thoughts of the Glock.

The story of prescription opioids in America today is not only one of addiction, overdoses and the crimes they have wrought, but also the story of pain patients like Kenyon Stewart and their increasingly desperate struggles to secure the medication. After decades of explosive growth, the annual volume of prescription opioids shrank 29 percent between 2011 and 2017, even as the number of overdose deaths has climbed ever higher, according to the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, which collects data for federal agencies. The drop in prescriptions has been greater still for patients receiving high doses, most of whom have chronic pain.

PHOTOS BY BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

T

he correction has been so rapid, and so excruciating for some patients, that a growing number of doctors, health experts and patient advocates are expressing alarm that the race to end one crisis may be inadvertently creating another.

“I am seeing many people who are being harmed by these sometimes draconian actions amid this headstrong rush into finding a simple solution to this incredibly complicated problem,” said Sean Mackey, the chief of Stanford University’s Division of Pain Medicine. “I do worry about the unintended consequences.”

Chronic pain patients, such as Stewart, are driving extraordinary distances to find or continue seeing doctors. They are flying across the country to fill prescriptions. Some have turned to unregulated alternatives such as kratom, which the Drug Enforcement Administration warns could cause dependence and psychotic symptoms. And yet others are threatening suicide on social media, and have even followed through, as doctors taper pain medication in a massive undertaking that Stefan Kertesz, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who studies addiction and opioids, described as “having no precedent in the history of medicine.”

The trend accelerated last year, in part as a result of guidelines the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention (CDC) published in 2016. Noting that long-term opioid use among patients with chronic pain increased the likelihood of addiction and overdose, and had uncertain benefits, they discouraged doses higher than the equivalent of 90 milligrams of morphine.

The guidelines, criticized as neither accounting for the differences in how quickly patients metabolize opioids nor addressing clearly enough what to do about patients who were receiving more than 90 morphine milligrams, helped open a new era of regulation. Dozens of states, Medicare and large pharmacy chains such as CVS have since announced or imposed restrictions on opioid prescriptions. The Justice Department, in a continuing push to

A sign along Interstate 90 is seen west of Spokane, Wash. Stewart has to make the 367-mile drive to his old pain clinic because he can’t find a nearby doctor to write his opioid prescription.

crack down on pill mills and reckless doctors, announced in January that it would focus on providers writing “unusual or disproportionate” prescriptions. And some physicians, fearful of the financial and legal peril in prescribing opioids, and newly aware of their hazards, have stopped prescribing them altogether.

“We have to be careful of using a blunt instrument where a fine scalpel is needed,” said former surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy, who prioritized the opioid crisis during his tenure, and wants to increase access to alternative treatments. “We already experienced a pendulum swing in one direction, and if we swing the pendulum in the other direction, we will hurt people.”

Stewart, who said he hurt more every day, let go of Tyra. “See you Friday night,” he whispered to her.

“Like always.”

He went outside to his truck.

He checked for the third time that his near-empty pain medication bottles were in his duffle bag.

Zipping the bag, he sighed. What he had left — five pills — would never last him until his next refill, two days from now. The pain, the withdrawal: All of it was only hours away. It would hit during the drive. He knew it.

How much longer could he keep doing this? How much longer could he afford to blow $900 a month — on gas, food, two nights

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in a motel, and pills for which he had no insurance? How much longer could he drive so many miles for less and less?

Something had to change.

But for now he started the truck, pulled out onto the mountain road, and then one mile was down, and there were 366 to go.

He drove a gray Ford F-150 with a jacked-up cab, oversized tires and a custom grill. It felt good to be behind its wheel, remembering the man he had once been, the one who’d made the money to buy it.

That guy had been a selfemployed trucker with braided hair and so much energy it sometimes irritated those around him.

Medical supplies, beef jerky, electronics — he’d load anything he could into his Roadrunner freightliner, then unload it across town. He lived in a big house in a Tacoma suburb and spent whatever came in, never considering that his hip would be shot from the heavy lifting by age 45, and that the surgery to replace it would go so wrong that he’d awaken screaming in pain, terrified that the life he had known was gone.

Twenty-eight miles down.

T

he first thing had been the pain. After the surgery, he said, it had felt like a knife dragging down his leg from his hip. He initially wanted revenge, so he said he called malpractice lawyers but was told his damage wasn’t severe enough to successfully sue. Then he just wanted the agony to go away, but it was 2014, and reports of an opioid epidemic were all over the news. Doctors who had once treated pain like a vital sign, basing opioid prescriptions on patients’ subjective ratings of their suffering, were suddenly hesitating. Attempts to address a crisis of undertreated pain had created a new crisis, this one of addiction, and Stewart quickly noticed suspicion not just among doctors but among friends and relatives, too. Did he really hurt that badly? Had he tried exercise?

What about Advil? Maybe he just needed more rest.

The first person who truly listened to him, besides his mother and Tyra, was Aileen Wedvik, a nurse practitioner in a small clinic near his house. “My savior,” he called her. She still believed in treating patients according to the pain they said they felt, and he

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COVER STORY

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

told her he felt a lot of it. She asked him to consider using marijuana and recommended physical therapy. But when the marijuana failed, and the co-pays from therapy became too expensive, she wrote prescriptions. She started him off on a daily dose of 30mg oxycodone and 12mg Dilaudid, equal to 93 morphine milligrams, then inched him up, month by month, until he told her he could function.

The first daily regimen that worked — 173 morphine milligrams — felt like creamer diluting bitter black coffee. He made his trucking routes, cared for Tyra, who has advanced multiple sclerosis, and his optimism returned.

He didn’t worry when his tolerance grew, and the pain resurged, and he was brought up to 436 morphine milligrams. Or when Tyra, who had always refused opioids herself, got angry at Wedvik for prescribing him so much. Or when, years after that first prescription, he was ultimately swallowing 584 morphine milligrams per day — more than six times the

The rise and fall of opioid prescriptions in the U.S. since 1992 Prescribed morphine milligram equivalents, in billions 240.3

170.7

25.4 1992

2011

2017

Source: IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science THE WASHINGTON POST

CDC recommended ceiling. He was still driving his truck, still making money. He wasn’t a loser, not yet.

Outside the car window, the scenery went by, a wash of greens and blues then browns as he

crossed into the state’s arid center, where there was nothing but brush, giant silos of wheat, bundles of hay and windmills slowly turning in the sun.

Stewart had been making this monthly drive since last June, starting weeks after he said a medical examiner noted his extraordinary opioid use and declined to renew his commercial driver’s license. He remembered the lost look on Tyra’s face when he said they needed to sell the house, that they’d never make the final $33,000 in payments. They talked about getting off the pills, but what about the pain? So they sold the house for $290,000, immediately losing one-third of that — to closing costs, the bank, and their move to the trailer, where a relative lets them live free, and where they’d soon be trapped, if he continued spending what little they had left on this drive.

One-hundred and 69 miles.

H

e could feel it now. The pain had begun as a tingle, then needle pricks, then a throb

The Cascade Range forms a backdrop behind a wind farm near Interstate 90 west of Vantage, Wash. On Stewart’s drive, the scenery is a wash of greens and blues then browns as he crosses into the state’s arid center.

coursing through his left leg, as he pulled off Interstate 90 and stared at the worst part of the drive.

Route 18 was frozen with traffic.

His heart was going fast. He was thinking about his last pills — three 8mg Dilaudid and two 30mg oxycodone — but knew he had to ration.

Then came a thought. He could drink a beer. A little alcohol helps.

All he had to do was find a gas station. But he knew what could happen. He could fail his urine test. The pain clinic could then kick him out for violating an agreement he’d signed promising that he wouldn’t mix the medication with alcohol, would submit to pill counts, and would treat opioids like “a loaded gun,” storing them where only he could get them.

He called the clinic, listened to the message saying, “We are no longer accepting any pain management referrals,” and the receptionist picked up.

“How do I put this?” he said.

“Am I going to get pee-tested tomorrow?”

He gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

“I want to have a beer,” he said.

“I need something.”

He heard her saying, “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t answer his question.

“You know me,” he pleaded, laughing nervously. “If I had a beer . . .”

“Have you found another pain clinic yet?” the receptionist, Jennifer Perkins, asked.

He hadn’t. A year of searching, and he hadn’t.

“Because, you know, in July she’s not going to be doing this anymore,” she said.

“I know,” he said, looking at the traffic, cars pressing in from every direction. “Believe me, I know.”

He hung up the phone, finished his bottle of water in one gulp and crushed it between his hands.

T

wenty-one miles away, the receptionist walked over to Aileen Wedvik’s office and told her that Kenyon Stewart had just called. He was thinking about drinking a beer. It sounded as if he was coming apart.

It was a call that had become more familiar, as Wedvik tapered 325 pain patients, some by 50 percent, others by 90, to bring them within the CDC guidelines.

When she’d first told Stewart and

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COVER STORY the others that she was leaving pain management, they had seemed to understand. Providers had gone to prison, lost their licenses, faced lawsuits. She already had received two complaints of excessive prescribing, both from insurance providers.

The state had substantiated neither, but she couldn’t deal with the stress of it anymore, so come June, she’d explained, she’d write the patients three final prescriptions, and then they would be on their own.

It was months later now, and the effects of the taper had set in, and not a single patient had found another doctor to take over their opioid regimens, Wedvik said, and they no longer seemed to understand. Stewart’s prescription already had been cut by 276 morphine milligrams, and others were struggling to walk, including one woman hobbling into her office, shoulders hunched.

Maggie Reygers, 57, sat down, grimacing in pain from a work injury that had herniated five discs in her spine. She said, “I’ve had a really bad month.” She said, “I’m just so angry.” She said, “You want to talk about pain? Please kill me.”

Wedvik handed her a nearly empty box of tissues. This isn’t what she got into medicine to do, she had been thinking. She wanted to help people, and her job had once felt like that. Many patients had been desperate when they found her. No one, they had said, would adequately treat them. So she tried to, and even though the dosages sometimes became very high, she trusted the patients, and the clinic’s rules to expose drug seekers, and that she was in fact helping, although these days she wasn’t sure.

“What did I do to have this happen to me?” next pleaded E.J., a 43-year-old paraplegic shooting victim who allowed a reporter to attend his appointment on the condition that he be identified only by his initials. “I’ve had a great increase in my lifestyle by using [opioids], and without them, I’m just a loser on the couch.”

“It’s just a matter of time before I have to be going through a bottle or two of Excedrin in a day,” later said Kevin Johnson, 56, a trucker whose lower back was injured in a traffic accident.

“I’m not sniffing it up my nose

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were ongoing in Wedvik’s office, too.

Some discussed it overtly: “I’ll be here for six months,” one man had said, “and then I’ll commit suicide.”

Others subtly: “I don’t want to kill myself,” said Karla Friend, a slight woman of 54 years. “But . . .”

Then there were patients such as Kenyon Stewart. Wedvik didn’t know about the Glock. But when he came into her office later that day, and was looking at her from across the desk, eyes red, hair disheveled, leg shaking, she knew something was very wrong.

“Can we have a talk?” Stewart said.

T BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

or shooting it in my arm,” Rose Kidd, 54, who has nerve damage from back surgery, now begged.

“It’s monitored.”

Which one was addicted?

Which one was dependent?

Whose pain was real? Whose pain wasn’t?

These were the questions, the nuances and ambiguities, that Wedvik navigated every day at a time when opioids were increasingly cast in absolutes: that to use them at all was to become addicted. But experts increasingly recognize this as a conflation of two separate things.

It is true that opioids cause physical dependence, and that higher doses are needed to achieve the same effect as tolerance grows, and that, when the dose falls, withdrawal symptoms may include pain that is difficult to differentiate from the underlying condition. But not everyone develops addiction, which Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, described as a brain disease that weakens self-control, incites intense cravings beyond physical dependence and occurs “only in a small percentage of people.” It is the “continued use of opioids despite harmful consequences in someone’s life,” Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said in a statement last year.

Wedvik worried about the con-

sequences of taking them away, too. Telling her staff that she was closing the pain clinic, she had said, “I will be shocked if we make it through this without anyone dying.”

She knew chronic-pain patients were a particularly vulnerable group. Scientists have shown they’re twice as likely to commit suicide, and what little research has been done on forcibly tapering opioid regimens has been troubling. One study, published last year in the journal General Hospital Psychiatry, tracked 509 military veterans involuntarily taken off opioids. It reported that 12 percent had suicidal ideation or violent suicidal behavior, nearly three times the rate of veterans at large.

She also knew about the hysteria in online chronic-pain forums. People were threatening to kill themselves because they couldn’t get medication. News articles about pain patients who had done it were being passed around on the Internet.

“My wife committed suicide in October as a direct result of this,” said Wes Haddix, a retired dentist in Charlottesville.

One doctor, Thomas Kline of Raleigh, N.C., recently came out of retirement and is reaching out to suicidal pain patients. “They write me, ‘Help me, I’m going to kill myself. What can I do?’ ” he said, echoing conversations that

Aileen Wedvik, the nurse practitioner who sees Stewart, pauses between patients at her practice in Lakewood. Wedvik is closing her pain practice because she thinks she must choose between hurting patients by providing inadequate prescriptions and going to prison for exceeding federal guidelines.

he evening before that appointment, Stewart limped into a cheap motel room. He downed a pill, then drove to a gas station, coming out with a sixpack of Natural Ice beer. He quickly drank one, felt better, and went to his old house, a brown twostory with big picture windows.

In the falling light, he watched it for a long while from a church parking lot.

Hours later, he couldn’t sleep.

This was it, he worried. He’d screwed up. They were going to drug-test him, then cut him off.

He texted Tyra, but didn’t tell her he was having a panic attack.

He chopped an oxycodone and a Dilaudid in half and took them.

He got up at 6:30 a.m., having slept for less than an hour, swallowed the other halves, and elevated his bad leg on a malfunctioning heater.

How much longer could he keep doing this?

His appointment with Wedvik was at 1:20 p.m., but he came in half an hour early. He crouched over the patient form in his hands, wondering whether to answer the questions honestly.

“Over the last 2 weeks,” it asked, how often had he felt “hopeless . . . bad . . . that [he was] a failure?” His pen went from “nearly every day” to “several days.” He next read, “Thoughts that you would be better off dead.” He marked “not at all,” and handed the document to Perkins, the receptionist he’d spoken to on the phone.

He joked with her, asking her about her 13 tattoos, before coming out with the question, as casually as he could: “Do I get to pee today?”

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COVER STORY

She said he wouldn’t have to, and he breathed in sharply, deeply.

He walked unsteadily toward Wedvik’s office, where she was seeing off a short-haired woman, who looked as though she’d been crying and who would attempt suicide a week later. He sat down and stretched out his bad leg.

Holding his glasses in one hand, he leaned forward.

Wedvik folded her hands and leaned forward herself, her face just a few feet from his.

“Do you remember what I was getting a long time ago?” he said of his prescription before the taper, voice thickening. “Is there any way you can do that one more time? Then cancel me off the program?”

He told her he couldn’t do this anymore. The drive. The money.

The anxiety. He’d like his final prescriptions, and have that be that.

She looked at him for a long time. She’d known him for four years, longer than most of her patients. She’d been with him through it all: the pain, the failed attempts at other treatments, his partner’s descent into illness, his unemployment and his move across the state. She’d never seen him so broken.

Doing what he asked, however, would go against her patient plan.

Six months of aggressive tapering, with office visits ending June.

Then three final months of prescriptions. This was far ahead of schedule.

“You’re going to knock me down anyway,” he pleaded.

What was the humane thing to do? Cut him loose? Or force him to drive back to see her again?

She sighed and said, “Oh, God.” She turned to her computer.

The sound of keys clacking filled the room.

Stewart was breathing louder and louder. His face was getting red. He was sniffling. Then suddenly he stood, opened the door and hurried into the bathroom across the hall.

Looking down at her scuffed and worn desk, she listened to the sobs and heaves coming from the bathroom.

“Twenty percent per month,” she told him when he returned, explaining how to taper himself.

She handed him three monthly prescriptions of his opioid regimen at its height of 584 morphine

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

milligrams, which could be filled only one at a time, hoping it would last long enough for him to taper himself off high-dose opioids. “Five percent per week. Just be careful.”

He tried to say something but couldn’t.

“You’re not thinking of doing anything, are you?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Promise?” she said.

He did. Then he picked up what they both believed would be the last prescriptions for opioids he’d ever receive, and Wedvik watched him go, before bringing in the next patient on her list.

H

e sat outside the grocery store pharmacy, the only one that he knew would fill his prescriptions, and tried to get himself under control. He closed his eyes. He thought of the truck bed he had to clean. Anything except what had just happened.

He splashed water on his face and looked in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes looked back. Taking one more deep breath, he dropped off his prescription, and the next morning, when it was time to pick up the medication, he was 14 minutes early.

He told the pharmacist this would be his last time. His pain clinic was closing, and he was on the other side of the state.

“So are you finding a different doctor, or is that hard?” the pharmacist asked.

Opioid dosages at a 10-year low Prescriptions per 100 people All dosage

72.4

11.5

66.5

High-dosage

2006

6.1 2016

Source: QuintilesIMS Transactional Data Warehouse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention THE WASHINGTON POST

“It’s not hard,” Stewart said.

“Just impossible.”

After a suspicious look, and a call to Wedvik’s office, out came medication for one month: two pill bottles, one containing 240 oxycodone 30mg, the other 210 Dilaudid 8mg. The register said $478.74, and he paid in cash. One minute and 38 seconds later, he was in his truck, swallowing two of each.

The truck came alive, and he steered for the mountains. The green and clouds were soon behind him, and only brown and sun lay ahead. He drove hour after hour, rest stop after rest stop, through a country that, on this same day, was undergoing another set of reckonings over pre-

Stewart relaxes at home, where he sleeps in a recliner because he can’t get comfortable in his bed. Stewart’s medication for one month is 240 oxycodone 30mg tablets and 210 Dilaudid 8mg tablets, at a cost of $478.74, which he pays because he does not have insurance.

scription opioids.

In Florida, a jury was finding a doctor guilty of five federal drug charges, including conspiring to possess and distribute prescription opioids.

In Pennsylvania, the governor was absorbing criticism that he wasn’t combating the opioid crisis after he vetoed a bill that would have regulated drug prescriptions for injured workers.

In Montana, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was telling an audience in Billings that doctors prescribed too many opioids, and that “we’re going to target those doctors.”

And meanwhile, in Washington state, on the side of a mountain 48 miles south of the Canadian border, Stewart was putting two bottles stuffed with opioids into his pocket and heading into his trailer.

“I missed you,” he said, hugging Tyra. “I missed you so much this time.”

He let her go and went into his bedroom, overrun with things that fit in their old house but not here. He reached up into the closet and placed the pills in an alcove at the top of his closet, where he thought nobody would think to look. He changed into shorts, grunting in pain, then went outside to look at the trailers along the dirt road.

Tomorrow, he would wake early and divide his medication, placing the week’s tapered ration into a plastic baggie. He would get on the computer and unsuccessfully try to buy kratom, which Wedvik had recommended. He would consider the Glock, then push the thought out of his head.

“It’s going to be hard,” he would tell Tyra of what awaited, and she would respond, “We’ve been through worse.”

But in this moment, he kept looking out into the valley, the mountain casting a long shadow across half of it.

An elderly neighbor came out and saw him.

“Did you just get back?” she asked, and he nodded.

“Got to go back again?” she asked.

“No more,” he said, turning to head back inside. “I’m done.”

He limped for the stairs and closed the door behind him, as the shadow outside began to move across the rest of the valley. n ©The Washington Post

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New graduates face a shifting market B Y J EFFREY J . S ELINGO

A

s this year’s college graduates transition from school to career, they are entering one of the healthiest job markets in decades for those with newly minted degrees. Compared with the Class of 2010 — who left college in the depths of the Great Recession, when unemployment was 9.5 percent — this year’s grads face unemployment of under 4 percent.

When students graduate matters significantly to their earnings in the formative years of their careers, according to researchers.

Generally, people who enter the job market during an economic downturn start with lower wages than those who graduate in better times, and it takes those who start behind a decade or more to catch up — if they ever do.

But the legacy of the Great Recession for graduates goes well beyond that unlucky cohort who left college then. Two recent studies on the job market for college graduates show just how much the market has shifted since the economic downturn ended.

The first study came from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and from Burning Glass Technologies, a workforce analytics firm. It analyzed the phenomenon of underemployment for graduates — meaning they are in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree — and found that 43 percent are in that predicament.

Many graduates, their parents and even college leaders minimize the importance of the first job, knowing that many others will follow. That mind-set could prove detrimental, according to the study. Two-thirds of graduates who are underemployed at commencement find themselves in the same situation five years later.

Even 10 years later, the outlook doesn’t improve: Seventy-four percent remain underemployed.

The second report was released

by Handshake, an online platform similar to LinkedIn that is used by more than 500 colleges and connects their students with 250,000 employers. In combing through

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

43% leave college underemployed and those with jobs often work in fields outside of their major more than 5 million applications that students submitted over the past year, the company found a change in the types of employers students are seeking. And it discovered changes in the skills graduates are applying outside their majors and what they want most out of a job.

Nonprofit and government agencies loom over campus hiring in ways they haven’t in the past.

Some 24 percent of students are applying to jobs outside of corporate America, according to Handshake. Of that group, some 40 percent of students are applying to nonprofits, 30 percent to the federal government and 22 percent to local governments.

Even when students go the corporate route, the companies where they are looking include a healthy mix of old brand-names where their parents could have worked. Indeed, IBM received the most applications in the past year

from students on Handshake.

Students are also looking for jobs outside the industries normally associated with their majors. In health care, more than 20 percent of open entry-level roles are aimed at graduates with tech skills. And students are looking for more flexibility in their work. The search terms “start-up” and “remote” were increasingly used by students on Handshake.

“The job market is more wide open for graduates than ever before,” Garrett Lord, co-founder and CEO of Handshake, said.

“They have plenty of choices of industries, jobs and locations to apply their skills.”

Both reports seem to indicate that the skill sets of graduates — rather than their major — might matter most in hiring. Taken together, the reports show that today’s undergraduates, along with their parents and colleges, need to prepare differently for the job

Graduates of Bowie State University in Maryland prepare to graduate. According to a study, two-thirds of graduates who are underemployed at commencement find themselves in the same situation five years later.

market than they did a decade ago.

For one, there needs to be less emphasis in college — and in the admissions process — that a major leads to a specific job. A college graduate’s ability to do the job matters more to recruiters than the major. The Handshake report showed that graduates are applying those skills across a range of industries. Engineers, for instance, are working in the fashion industry, jobs typically associated with arts majors, and writers are employed in tech firms mostly identified with computer science majors.

Second, liberal arts graduates don’t fare as poorly in the job market as many students and parents assume. In the past few months, the liberal arts have been under fire, with a handful of colleges eliminating, or threatening to wipe out, majors such as English and history. Those majors and others in the liberal arts still matter in hiring. But the key for students in those majors is to get specific hard skills (such as computer coding or comfort with data) and learn how to translate the competencies they developed in the major, such as writing and critical thinking, so employers can better understand the background of applicants during the recruiting process.

Finally, colleges need to make career services part of the curriculum from Day 1. As the StradaBurning Glass report showed, the first job matters more than we have assumed. Colleges like to say they prepare students for their fifth job, not their first. That way of thinking needs to change. Students must get specific skills and find hands-on experiences, such as internships and undergraduate research, much earlier.

If students are armed with a broad education and marketable skills, they should have little difficulty finding gainful and fulfilling employment after college. n Selingo is an author, former editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education and an educator. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

A party that showed the best of America N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

T HOMAS O LIPHANT

T DINNER IN CAMELOT The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House

By Joseph A. Esposito ForeEdge.

230 pp. $29.95

he credit for arguably the best idea ever for a White House event goes to the fertile brain of Richard Goodwin. In a note to Jacqueline Kennedy in November 1961, the president’s aide was to the point: “How about a dinner for the American winners of the Nobel Prize?”

Within six months, the largest social event of the New Frontier had occurred. By contemporary accounts, it was a smash. And it has resonated through the decades as a symbol of what that “one brief, shining moment” was capable of on its best days, and of the impact a White House can have on American culture and the creative minds who inhabit it. Comparisons to the disgusting atmosphere of the present are obvious.

John Kennedy was pleased, but not entirely. According to his and his wife’s friend, the artist William Walton, the president called him later to complain about the woman who had been seated on his right, Ernest Hemingway’s fourth wife and widow of a year, Mary, who gave him repeated guff for his Cuba policy; Kennedy was more impressed by the dignified woman on his left, Katherine Marshall, the widow of George C. Marshall, the World War II commander and architect of the postwar reconstruction plan that bore his name.

“Well, your friend Mary Hemingway is the biggest bore I’d had for a long time,” Walton quoted JFK as saying. “If I hadn’t had Mrs. Marshall I would have had a terrible night.”

Walton couldn’t say much in reply: Mary Hemingway was right next to him in his Georgetown home when the call came.

According to author Joseph A. Esposito — whose “Dinner in Camelot” is a delightful, detailed account of the dinner, its background, its repercussions and its lasting meaning — the 127 seated guests (at 19 tables, 14 in the State Dining Room and five more in the

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

From left, novelist Pearl Buck, President John F. Kennedy, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and poet Robert Frost exchange greetings before the after-dinner program at the White House on April 29, 1962.

Blue Room, where Mrs. Kennedy was located) included 49 Nobel laureates and spouses. The vast majority had toiled in the hard sciences; for the April 29, 1962, affair, the list expanded to include a sprinkling of Latin American luminaries and one Canadian, Lester Pearson. He was on his way to becoming prime minister after getting a Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for his efforts as foreign minister to end the fighting over the Suez Canal. It also included several bright lights in the emerging field of American letters. Of the five U.S. winners of the literature prize, three were dead (Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill and Hemingway); William Faulkner, in his final weeks and under care in Charlottesville, said he thought 100 miles was a bit too far to go for supper; and John Steinbeck, who got his Nobel later that year, pleaded business in Europe. T.S. Eliot, a St. Louis native and eventually a British subject, wasn’t invited; but Pearl Buck was there

and briefly debated Korea policy with Kennedy before the postsupper program in the East Room.

Relative youth also had its place. Thirty-eight-year-old William Styron (his wife, Rose, wrote the forward to the book) and 37year-old James Baldwin attended.

They were close friends, with much of their creative and activist lives ahead of them. But 43-yearold J.D. Salinger, already a budding recluse, declined without an excuse.

Esposito brings a solid blend of intellectual and writing background to his task. He has taught history, written it and lived it in three administrations. The book is a largely skillful mix of diligently researched detail and chatty anecdotes, all woven together without excessively florid Camelot rhetoric. Readers with equally rich backgrounds can probably skip the frequent digressions (histories of White House rooms, for example), but we generalists appreciate the added information.

He calls his work “a paean to what America can be.”

The evening’s performer was the distinguished actor Fredric March, who read then-unpublished material from Hemingway as well as excerpts from George Marshall’s plan-unveiling speech at Harvard. White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige noted ahead of time that March was extremely nervous and led him upstairs to lie down for a halfhour. When she informed him where he was, on the huge bed in the Lincoln Bedroom, tears formed in the actor’s eyes.

Barely 18 months later, ABC produced a tribute to the president days after his murder that was entirely about his and the first lady’s vigorous promotion of American arts and letters. The host was Fredric March. n Thomas Oliphant is co-author, with Curtis Wilkie, of “The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK’s Five-Year Campaign.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

If poets could solve a crime . . .

The rise of geeks and a potent Force

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

n “The Dante Chamber,” Matthew Pearl’s new thriller — a sequel of sorts to his 2003 bestseller “The Dante Club” — murder takes a very literary turn. Sparked by Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy,” the crimes are solved by a crack team of poets and painters: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and the American doctor-poet-essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes (not to be confused with his son and namesake, the great Supreme Court justice).

Set in 1870 London, the novel is most enjoyable when Pearl portrays interactions among the poets, who variously regard one another with admiration and annoyance. If writers interest you, you’ll enjoy Pearl’s evocation of these esteemed authors, who prove to be all too human.

Christina, the heart of the novel, rejects all suitors because she’s determined both to find her brother and to give her all to poetry. To Browning, “there was something heroic about her, like a figure out of a fairy tale wrapped in fire.”

Gabriel Rossetti’s angry rants about critics’ “conspiracy to persecute me” echo a timeless refrain among writers. We share Browning’s touching memory of his wife’s final moments: “ ‘How do you feel?’ he asked her. ‘Beautiful,’ came her smiling reply.

Within a few minutes she died with her head on his cheek.”

She lives on in the famous sonnet that begins: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

During one literary debate, Gabriel declares that “The three greatest English imaginations are Shakespeare, Coleridge and Shelley.” Whereupon Tennyson insists “The one I count greater than them all — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, even Byron — is Keats.”

With all due respect to Keats,

it was good to see a bit of praise for Shakespeare amid the book’s incessant Dante-worship.

The literary talk is fun, but the solution of the murders is less so.

The first victim is a member of Parliament who is killed in a London park; a massive stone has inexplicably been tied around his neck and broken it.

Soon thereafter an attractive woman dies on a London street; her eyelids have been sewn shut.

Other suspicious deaths — all in some way linked to “Divine Comedy” — follow.

Pearl offers three main villains. The most important is a strange, beautiful, lethal woman called Sibbie, who is said to be a “veritable prophetess” who “shared the spirit of Dante’s Beatrice.” That’s high praise in this book, but Beatrice was celebrated for her goodness whereas Sibbie is the coldblooded architect of numerous deaths.

She and two confederates have a large property in the English countryside where they train recruits to their cause, which appears to be world conquest.

“We can fill England and beyond with our believers,” one of her henchmen boasts, although only a few dozen of those believers exist.

When one of our poet-sleuths falls into Sibbie’s clutches, the others set out to the rescue. A bloody confrontation ensues, one that goes on far too long and largely defies belief. Pearl does far better with poets than with criminals.

“How small a matter literature is, Miss Rossetti, to the great, seething, toiling, struggling, love-making, bread-winning, child-rearing, death-awaiting men and women who fill this huge, palpitating world of ours!”

Those are words to remember. n Anderson, who regularly reviews crime fiction for The Washington Post, is a novelist and journalist.

T THE DANTE CHAMBER

By Matthew Pearl Penguin. 356 pp. $28

I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture

By A.D. Jameson Farrar Straus Giroux.

304 pp. $26

l

REVIEWED BY

J ONATHAN L IEBSON

he title of A.D. Jameson’s new book comes from a crucial scene in the original “Star Wars” movie: When a cocky admiral rejects Darth Vader’s warnings about the Force and scoffs at his “sad devotion to that ancient religion,” Vader walks calmly toward the man, puts him in a nasty, hands-free chokehold and says, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

In Jameson’s case, these words are meant to admonish critics who belittle the “Star Wars” effect on American cinema. The author not only affirms the value of his beloved sci-fi, superhero and adventure films, but he celebrates their virtual chokehold on our collective viewing experience.

A self-described geek, Jameson aligns himself with enlightened critics who view the 1970s as a crucial turning point in American cinema. The same decade that spawned gritty, realist films like “The Godfather,” “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver” also ushered in the era of the blockbuster, thanks to “Jaws” and “Star Wars.” However, Jameson takes issue with the claim that these box office hits were a departure from the more critically acclaimed films of the era. “Star Wars,” he contends, is actually a stepbrother of the realist genre. He explains how director George Lucas intentionally broke with the “shiny and sleek” sci-fi films of the past, opting instead for a “scuffed and dirty” look to the movie’s outfits, droids and even spaceships.

On this front, Jameson is persuasive. Even as one marvels at the moon-size Death Star or the play of lightsabers, the movie’s heroes are a bunch of everyday misfits in shabby clothing, not unlike the other ’70s protagonists whom critics so admire. The ragtag crew even ends up — most unheroically — in a trash compactor that nearly crushes them to death. The seminal feat of “Star Wars,” Jameson argues, is just how ordinary it makes outer

space seem: the way Lucas successfully “renders the remarkable mundane.”

Such realism is the pillar of the geek’s immersive experience.

Jameson calls it “world-building,” or the creation of a supernatural realm with understandable laws, orderly concepts, languages and a backstory that fans can pore over, memorize and — of course — reenact. If that portrayal brings to mind stereotypes about costume play, “Doctor Who” and Dungeons & Dragons, Jameson doesn’t mind. He owns up to a childhood of being picked on and the sanctuary he found in the “Geek Dorm” at college. His personal story adds a lighter touch to the book’s wonkiness, and it’s hard not to share his enthusiasm as he describes how his favorite characters colonized a world that once ridiculed them.

Unfortunately, when Jameson turns to the evolution of comicbook superheroes, the book begins to stall — just as it does later when it details the numerous reference guides, games and other auxiliaries through which fantasy worlds grow ever-deeper roots.

By the end, Jameson is spoiling for a fight. Although he concedes the damage that geek culture suffers from being mainlined, he can’t give up his quarrel with critics who label his favorite genre “childish” and “unserious.” Even sympathetic readers will notice Jameson losing some of his earlier finesse, almost starting to rant.

Here, the author might do well to remember the Rebel Alliance.

Its struggle with the dark side is less about absolute victory — and more about a prolonged battle of ideals.

In the same way, geeks should forget about slaying their critics for good and instead have faith that their culture will carry a force all its own. n Liebson teaches writing, literature and culture at the New School and New York University. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Bill Clinton cleared a path for President Trump DANA MILBANK is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post.

We didn’t know it at the time, of course. But in Bill Clinton were the seeds of Donald Trump. ¶ With 20 years of hind­ sight, it is clear. To see the former president — now pro­ moting a mystery he co­wrote with novelist James Patter­ son — sit down with NBC’s Craig Melvin was to see how Clinton’s handling of the Monica Lewinsky affair was a pre­ cursor of the monstrosity we now have in the White House: dismissing unpleasant facts as “fake news,” self­righteously claiming victimhood, attacking the press and cloaking per­ sonal misbehavior in claims to be upholding the Constitu­ tion.

The former president’s offenses were far less serious than President Trump’s. Trump’s many misdeeds — against women, law, facts, democracy and decency — are in a category of their own. But Clinton set us on the path, or at least accelerated us down the path, that led to today.

I covered the Lewinsky saga and wrote at the time that there was a convincing case Clinton perjured himself and that his personal behavior was appalling.

I didn’t join the clamor for him to resign, and I thought the impeachment proceedings against him were partisan and absurd. In retrospect, though, it might have been better for the country if Clinton had resigned.

My perspective changed because of the #MeToo movement but also because of what followed Clinton’s affair: He had only lied about sex, but the George W. Bush administration started a war under false pretense, and now Trump governs with utter disregard for truth.

During the interview broadcast on Monday morning, Melvin asked Clinton whether, with the hindsight of #MeToo, he would have done things differently if he were president today.

Clinton’s answer: “Well, I don’t think it would be an issue

because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts. If the facts were the same today, I wouldn’t [do things differently]. . . . You, typically, have ignored gaping facts in describing this, and I bet you don’t even know them.”

“Imagined facts”? Sounds a lot like “fake news” or “alternative facts.” Melvin had accurately and neutrally described the scandal.

Clinton was Trumpian, too, in portraying himself as the victim.

When asked whether he has apologized to Lewinsky, he replied that “nobody believes that I got out of that for free. I left the White House $16 million in debt.”

Are we to feel bad for Clinton, who, according to Forbes, made $189 million in the 15 years after leaving the White House?

Melvin read from Lewinsky’s recent piece in Vanity Fair: “He was 27 years my senior, with enough life experience to know better. . . . I was in my first job out of college.” Melvin noted that Lewinsky had taken responsibility for her part, and he asked Clinton whether, in retrospect, he takes more responsibility.

Clinton, arms folded on chest, was unbending. “This was litigated 20 years ago. Two-thirds of the American people sided

MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former president Bill Clinton, seen in November, became defensive when asked in an interview about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

with me.”

No, they didn’t “side” with him.

He’s presumably referring to jobapproval numbers; the economy was booming then, and many Americans liked his policies and thought Ken Starr excessive. But a large majority also found Clinton untrustworthy and of low moral character.

Clinton, like Trump has done, proposed a conspiracy theory to deflect questions, saying people “conveniently omitted” facts about the Lewinsky affair “partly because they’re frustrated that they got all these serious allegations against” Trump “and his voters don’t seem to care.” He again implicated the media, saying Trump’s misconduct “hasn’t gotten anything like the coverage that you would expect.”

Clinton hid his behavior behind high principle (“I think I did the right thing. I defended the Constitution”) on the same day the current president complained about the “unconstitutional” investigation of him and his campaign.

Unlike Trump, Clinton publicly apologized — when caught. But he responded angrily when asked why he didn’t apologize privately to Lewinsky — prompting the previously silent Patterson to jump in: “It’s 20 years ago —

come on!” he said, suggesting Melvin might as well be asking about John F. Kennedy’s or Lyndon B. Johnson’s affairs.

Clinton eagerly pursued this non sequitur: “You think President Kennedy should have resigned?” he asked Melvin. “Do you believe President Johnson should have resigned?”

Why does Clinton, 20 years later, still struggle with admitting fault? Perhaps he feels his behavior with Lewinsky is being unfairly equated to that of Harvey Weinstein or Trump. But #MeToo isn’t just about assault. Clinton did just fine after his fling with the intern. She never escaped it.

Melvin said that, off-camera, Clinton acknowledged standards had rightly changed since 1998.

Why can’t he say so publicly? If a Democrat behaved today as Clinton did then, it wouldn’t be dismissed as “bimbo eruptions.”

He’d be drummed out of office, as former senator Al Franken was for his behavior.

But this is larger than #MeToo. Back then, when Clinton disgraced the office with personal misconduct and lies, we didn’t pause to think what might happen if an utterly unscrupulous man were to attain that position someday.

Now we know. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

What Reagan would say today PATTI DAVIS is an author and the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. This was written for The Washington Post.

My father used to talk about a recurring dream he had in which he was walking into a beautiful white building with grand columns, knowing that it was his new home. When he was elected president, he said the image finally made sense to him. Once in the White House, he never had the dream again.

He had a reverence and a love for America that burned in his eyes when he looked at the flag, that bled into his words when he spoke to the country. Selfishly, I used to feel slighted by that love.

I referred sometimes to my “sibling rivalry” with America.

My strident protests against some of my father’s policies definitely got his attention, which was what I intended — but they also wounded him, which was not my intention. In his last years of life, when Alzheimer’s disease had stolen many things but not love, I was able to sit with him and tell him my regrets. I miss my father in deeply personal ways. I also miss the dignity that he brought to the task of leading this country, the deep respect he had for our democracy, and now, after so much time has passed, I miss how much he loved America.

People often ask me what he would say if he were here now.

Sometimes I’m a bit glib in response, pointing out that he’d be 107 years old. Other times, I simply say he’d be pretty horrified at where we’ve come to. But as the June 5 anniversary of his death drew near, I let myself imagine what he would say to the country he loved so much.

I think he would remind us that America began as a dream in the minds of men who dared to envision a land that was free of tyranny, with a government designed and structured so that no one branch of government could dominate the others. It was a bold and brave dream.

But, he would caution, no government is infallible. Our democracy, because it is founded on the authority of “We the people,” puts the burden of vigilance on all American citizens.

Countries can be splintered from within, he would say. It’s a

sinister form of destruction that can happen gradually if people don’t realize that our Constitution will protect us only if the principles of that document are adhered to and defended. He would be appalled and heartbroken at a Congress that refuses to stand up to a president who not only seems ignorant of the Constitution but who also attempts at every turn to dismantle and mock our system of checks and balances.

He would plead with Americans to recognize that the caustic, destructive language emanating from our current president is sullying the dream that America once was. And in a time of increased tensions in the

He would ask us to think about the Statue of Liberty and the light she holds for immigrants.

world, playing verbal Russian roulette is not leadership, it’s madness. He would point to one of the pillars of our freedom — a free press — which sets us apart from dictatorships and countries ruled by despots. He didn’t always like the press — no president does — but the idea of relentlessly attacking the media as the enemy would never have occurred to him. And if someone else had done so, he wouldn’t have tolerated it.

He would ask us to think about the Statue of Liberty and the light she holds for immigrants coming to America for a better life. Immigrants like his ancestors, who persevered despite prejudice and signs that read “No Irish or dogs allowed.”

There is a difference between immigration laws and cruelty.

He believed in laws; he hated cruelty.

Despite my father’s innate humility, he would ask the people of this country to reflect on his own words from his famous speech, “A Time for Choosing,” delivered in 1964: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” n

SUNDAY, JUNE 10, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY BAGLEY FOR THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Kids’ books are missing something CHRISTINE MICHAUD WOODS is a writer living in South Berwick, Maine. This was written for The Washington Post.

There’s a troubling pattern in children’s books: When the characters are not human, as is often the case, females are often strangely absent.

I am not splitting politically correct hairs. “Chick ‘n’ Pug,” a 2010 book by Jennifer Sattler, was my tipping point. The main character is a baby chicken who wants to avoid a life of “laying eggs all day” and sets off to find adventure with “Wonder Pug,” a male. The feline antagonist is male, too. But the kicker? The would-be egg-laying chick is also male. And no, this is not a story about gender confusion. There is no rooster reveal later in the book. This oversight on the part of the author, editors and publishers would be laughable if it weren’t so disturbing.

Authors lend everything from beavers to bulldozers big personalities and adventures but rarely give them a female pronoun. After I discovered the discrepancy in “Chick ‘n’ Pug,” I tore through every book on my daughter’s shelf. I examined the first 50 published in the past 10 years, and tallied every nonhuman character: 45 female and 104 male.

One 2011 study confirms that I’m not imagining things: In 5,618 titles evaluated, nearly twice as many males are depicted as females. According to the study, rates are even worse where animal characters

are concerned.

I’m no scientist, but I believe females account for about 50 percent of the planet’s population. So where are we in books that make up our children’s earliest literary diet?

If girls have challenges with selfworth, it can’t help that the stories they hear from infancy ignore their very existence.

Females do abound in the form of mothers. For example, Eve Bunting’s new picture book “I’m A Duck” tells the tale of a duck afraid of water. The scared duck’s sex is ambiguous, but five other creatures are identified as male. The lone female is, as

BY SACK FOR THE STAR TRIBUNE

usual, a mother on the sidelines.

And if the characters are engaged in social drama, they’re a mix of girls and boys, whether humans or llamas. But if the story involves industrious skunks or adventurous appliances, females are often missing. Sadly, the conditioning is so strong that the authors guilty of this imbalance are often women.

Another distressing example is “A Sick Day for Amos McGee,” written by Philip C. Stead and illustrated by Erin E. Stead. The 2011 Caldecott Medal winner honors friendship and empathy with gorgeous prose and artwork. It was one of my favorites until I realized: The human zookeeper’s friends — a tortoise, a penguin, an elephant, an owl and a rhinoceros — are all male. My blood pressure rose as I read one single page full of “him” and “his.”

If creators as thoughtful as the Steads could write a book lacking a single female character, we clearly have a problem.

Authors need not manufacture a flood of “girl power” books and stories subverting the old princess theme. The solution can be more natural, and therefore

more powerful: Just take a whole bunch of “he’s” and turn them to “she’s.”

Many parents are already working to do just that in their daily lives. When my husband or I see a caterpillar outside, we’re as likely to say, “Look at how fuzzy she is!” as we are to say, “He is.”

Too many book publishers have not thought to do the same, despite the rounds of editing that their stories undergo. But some authors have overcome the male assumption.

“A House in the Woods” by Inga Moore, for example, left me stunned with gratitude as I read it to my daughter. Two of the four main critters are female.

They help to build a house and are drawn like any other pig or bear.

So thank you, Inga Moore, Mo Willems, Tad Hills and others who are bucking the trend. To parents and educators, remind your favorite authors that half of all squirrels and rhinos have two X chromosomes. Stop purchasing books that portray a weirdly imbalanced world.

To authors and publishers who have not realized the power of pronouns, who might even forget who lays the eggs, get with the program. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 10, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Marriage BY

J OHN G OTTMAN

AND

C HRISTOPHER D OLLARD

Marriage is one of the oldest social, economic, religious and legal in­ stitutions in the world, and there’s no shortage of opinions on what makes it work. But much of the conventional wisdom is not based on evidence, and some is flat­out wrong. After researching thousands of couples for more than 40 years at the Gottman Institute, these are some of the myths we’ve encountered most often.

MYTH NO. 1 Common interests keep you together.

The important thing is not what you do together; it’s how you interact while doing it. Any activity can drive a wedge between two partners if they’re negative toward each other. It doesn’t matter whether two people both enjoy kayaking if, when they head out on the lake, one says, “That’s not how you do a J-stroke, you idiot!” Our research has shown that criticism, even of paddling skills, is one of the four destructive behaviors that indicate a couple will eventually divorce. A stronger predictor of compatibility than shared interests is the ratio of positive to negative interactions, which should be 20-to-1 in everyday situations, whether a couple is doing something they both enjoy or not.

MYTH NO. 2 Never go to bed angry.

This advice pushes couples to solve their problems right away.

Yet everyone has their own methods of dealing with disagreements, and research indicates that about two-thirds of recurring issues in marriage are never resolved because of personality differences.

In our “Love Lab,” where we studied physiological reactions of couples during arguments (including coding of facial muscles related to specific emotions), we found that when couples fight, they are so physiologically stressed — increased heart rate, cortisol in

the bloodstream, perspiring, etc.

— that it is impossible for them to have a rational discussion. With one couple, we intentionally stopped their argument about a recurring issue by saying we needed to adjust some of our equipment. We asked them to read magazines for 30 minutes before resuming the conversation. When they did so, their bodies had physiologically calmed down, which allowed them to communicate rationally and respectfully. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed during a fight, take a break and come back to it later, even if that means sleeping on it.

MYTH NO. 3 Couples therapy is for fixing a broken marriage.

This idea often keeps spouses from seeking the sort of regular maintenance that would benefit almost any relationship. The average couple waits six years after serious issues arise before getting help with their marital problems, and by then it’s often too late: Half of all divorces occur within the first seven years of marriage. In a therapist’s office, spouses can learn conflictmanagement skills and ways to connect and understand each other. The point of counseling is not to salvage a bad marriage or sort out trauma. It’s about revealing the truth about a relationship.

MYTH NO. 4 Affairs are the main cause of divorce.

While affairs can destroy the

JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Modern couples are told numerous things to guarantee a happy relationship, but often this advice isn’t based on sound evidence.

foundation of trust upon which a marriage is built, the cause of divorce typically precedes the affair. In a study from the Divorce Mediation Project, 80 percent of divorced men and women cited growing apart and loss of a sense of closeness to their partner as the reason for divorce. Only 20 to 27 percent blamed their separation on an extramarital affair. In their clinical work, John and Julie Gottman learned that partners who have affairs are usually driven to them not because of a forbidden attraction but because of loneliness. There were already serious, if subtle, problems in the marriage before the affair occurred.

MYTH NO. 5 Marriages benefit from a ‘relationship contract.’

It’s important to do nice things for your partner and to do your fair share around the house, principles that an increasing number of couples have decided to formalize with a contract.

The concept, though, has no basis in science. In 1977, researcher Bernard Murstein found that marriages oriented around reciprocity were less

successful. And from what we’ve seen in our clinical work, keeping track can cause couples to keep score, which can lead to resentment. Dealmaking, contracts and quid pro quo mostly operate in unhappy marriages. Criticism and contempt can arise from unfulfilled expectations, especially if those expectations are quantified. And when one partner does something nice for the other and there is a contract in place, they may expect something equally nice in return.

That response may not happen for any reason — a busy week, forgetfulness — which can create resentment and an environment of trying to “win.”

Couples need to act in kind and loving ways, intentionally and attentively, as often as they can.

Some things simply cannot be mandated, not even by contract. n Gottman is the founder, along with Julie Gottman, of the Gottman Institute. He has conducted 40 years of research on marital stability and divorce prediction.

Dollard is the content manager and editor in chief at the Gottman Institute.

This was written for The Washington Post.

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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. 8TH ANNUAL

It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties.

And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.

Saturday, August 25, 2018 6pm to 9pm Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com or at the door Presented by Foothills Magazine

oothills

WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON