Substacks
Opioids Decimated a Kentucky Town. Recovering Addicts Are Saving It. Sam Quinones
In early 2020, Mandi Fugate Sheffel, 42, opened a tiny bookstore in her hometown of Hazard, in eastern Kentucky. Everyone thought she was crazy.
Downtown Hazard was a forbidding place to start any business, much less a bookstore. The coal mines that once supported the area had closed over the past few decades. Many brick buildings from Hazard’s heyday were gone, bequeathing a gap-toothed look to Main Street. The rest were empty or occupied by attorneys and bail bondsmen.
What’s more, Fugate Sheffel couldn’t afford a website or employees. She had never run a business before. And she had a complicated personal history to wrestle with.
But she loved to read—particularly contemporary Appalachian authors like Silas House, James Still, and Gurney Norman, who told stories that felt real to her. She figured others in town were tired, like her, of driving two hours to Lexington to buy books.
So, on January 30, she opened Read Spotted Newt in a 250-square-foot space—the size of a small bedroom.
I met Fugate Sheffel last spring when I visited Hazard (population 5,000) for the first time. I came to speak about my book, The Least of Us, about America’s drug-addiction epidemic. I had heard about the town, and had formed an image of it as the buckle on eastern Kentucky’s opioid belt.
From Fugate Sheffel, though, I heard another story—one that I heard elsewhere in eastern Kentucky, and in West Virginia and southwest Virginia and the southern tier of Ohio.
“When you don’t have industry, you’re having ecological disaster and a drug epidemic—you would think all those things would get us to a place where the town would be uninhabitable,” Fugate Sheffel told me. “But that’s not what I’m seeing at all. I’m seeing a lot of people rally.”
The loping hills of eastern Kentucky are studded with scores of towns like Hazard—and nearby Prestonsburg and Pineville and Corbin—that, over the centuries, emerged in the valleys and along its rivers.
The beginning of these places stretched back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century and the first coal mines, mostly in the Allegheny Mountains, in the eastern part of the state. By the early twentieth century, coal dominated the region, with roughly 700,000 men and boys toiling in the mines of Kentucky and neighboring West Virginia.
For decades, there was stability. Lots of jobs, no drugs. (In fact, Kentucky’s state House of Representatives passed a bill banning alcohol in 1914, four years before Prohibition. The bill died in the state Senate.)
In the 1990s, “as one declined and things got worse, the other increased and things got worse,” Les Stapleton, the mayor of Prestonsburg (population 4,000), 35 miles northeast of Hazard, told me about the correlation between jobs and drugs.
Larger forces over which locals had little or no control exacerbated things: the rise of natural gas, new environmental standards, our shifting political and cultural landscape.
By the early 2000s, the region had become the epicenter of the new opioid epidemic, which spiraled out of the Big Sandy River and flowed through eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and southwest Virginia.
Downtowns emptied out. Buildings were abandoned. About the only new local businesses were “pill mills”—clinics that prescribed huge quantities of prescription painkillers. In the little evangelical churches, they prayed for an end to “hillbilly heroin.”
Hazard, the seat of surrounding Perry County, had thrived for over a century with the mines, but when the mines closed the town mostly closed down, too. By the late 2010s, Perry County was the worst hit county in the United States when it came to opiates.
Hazard, like so many of these places, took on a haunted feeling, as if the whole world that used to be here—people, storefronts, churches, marching bands, Friday night football, bowling leagues, quilting clubs—just disappeared.
But then, weirdly and unexpectedly, at the same time that everything was falling apart, things started to get better—and that old world started, very tentatively, to build itself back up.
In the past few years, some 43 businesses have opened in Hazard, creating 171 new jobs, said Bailey Richards, the town’s coordinator of downtown development. That includes a toy store, a café, a women’s boutique, a quilt and apparel place, and a smoothie shop. A longtime restaurant just moved downtown.
The population, which declined for most of the latter half of the twentieth century, now appears to be inching up: in 2010, there were just south of 4,500 people in Hazard; by 2021, that figure had jumped by 500 or so people, and everyone thought it would keep rising. That growth was driven mostly by outsiders—new families, mostly from cities in Kentucky, in search of a better future, and immigrants, including a nascent Latino community.
Shane Barton, the downtown development coordinator at the University of Kentucky’s Community and Economic Development Initiative, went so far as to call Hazard “a hip destination for young people.”
It was hard to say why this was happening. Gradually, people were becoming more aware of the crisis of Appalachia and were doing things trying to help. (President Bill Clinton paid a visit to Hazard in 1999 to bring attention to its mounting woes.) Covid pushed people to move out of the cities. And there were the recovering addicts; they weren’t expensive to hire if you needed a barista or someone to stock your shelves or paint your walls, and they were eager to work, to live.
In Hazard, about a quarter of the new jobs are held by recovering addicts. In Pineville, an hour and a half southwest of Hazard, one-third of new jobs are filled by people in recovery, Jacob Roan, who oversees economic development in the town, told me.
“When somebody gets clean, they want to change the world, and have ideas of how to change the world,” Stephanie Callahan, a former addict and current business owner in Hazard, told me. “You do something just to prove you can do it.”
That’s what inspired Joey Jones—the can-do spirit.
Jones and his wife, Nikki, grew up in Hazard, went to the University of Louisville, and in 2019, returned home after ten years away, now with two kids.
Though a trained social worker, Joey Jones opened a toy store. This was last year. He called it Ready Set Play, and it’s on Main Street. Jones advertises on social media and, despite selling toys that are available online, he is expanding.
“The small business community here feels like family,” Jones said.
Mandi Fugate Sheffel, who knew something about hard times and people coming together, agreed.
She had been in high school in the 1990s, as the mines were closing and pain pills were invading. “One day, we were drinking beer in the back of a truck,” she said. “Then, all of a sudden, these pills were everywhere.” By 1997, she was an OxyContin addict.
The addicts dubbed a local park “Pillville,” and Fugate Sheffel got out. She moved to western Kentucky, came home in 2002, got sober, married, had a son. She survived.
So did her bookstore, against all odds.
A few days after she opened it, in 2020, it was flooded. Then Covid hit and Kentucky’s governor banned in-store shopping, and Fugate Sheffel thought this might really be it for Read Spotted Newt.
But after local media reported on Read Spotted Newt’s woes, Fugate Sheffel started getting orders from all over. Soon, she said, “I was shipping books everywhere—Boston, Florida, Texas, L.A. Anybody who had any tie to eastern Kentucky who knew this was going on were like, ‘We gotta make sure she makes this work.’ ”
By late 2020, she had moved to a larger space—a triangular building on a corner that once housed Hazard’s tourist welcome center. The city renovated it for her.
There are other pockets of hope scattered across the region.
In Prestonsburg, an hour north of Hazard, there are now five locally owned restaurants, all but one of which opened in the last five years. An Indian restaurant is coming soon. The two-block historic downtown once had eleven abandoned buildings. Now, all are occupied.
In Pineville, Kentucky (population 1,600), just north of the Tennessee line, the downtown was similarly decimated. Now there are boutiques, a hair salon, a furniture store, and several restaurants. Importantly, noted Jacob Roan, the town’s economic development director, “Those businesses are still in business six, seven years after opening.”
In Corbin (population 8,000), just up the highway from Pineville and pushing up against the Daniel Boone National Forest, several old buildings have been redone. They now house restaurants, a clothing boutique, a print shop, a café, an ice cream parlor, a record store, and a pinball museum.
“Everybody is like, ‘What can I start? What’s missing around here?’ ” Corbin Mayor Suzie Razmus told me.
Something else locals are starting to see in these places: people. On the street, outside their favorite coffee shop, chatting with a friend through an open car window.
In the past, a town sprouted up around a big factory that employed hundreds or more people.
But no one’s waiting any longer for factories or big-box stores—to say nothing of the mines or unions—to save them. “Too many have come in to try to save us, and they don’t,” Stapleton, the mayor of Prestonsburg, said. “We got to do it ourselves.”
Now, he’s facing a problem he could never have anticipated: a shortage of affordable housing. This has been driven, he added, by outsiders who, since Covid, have been moving to Prestonsburg and other towns across the region. A local internet company is expanding service throughout the town.
Jeff Siegler, whose firm Revitalize, or Die advises small towns on rebuilding, said the area’s success “has to be about small, incremental victories—one business at a time.”
The new generation of mayors, town councilors, and city planners across much of Appalachia, who had come through the disaster of the last three decades and seemed inspired by recovering addicts in their own communities, understood what Siegler was saying: small is good; local is good; people are good.
Instead of trying to lure massive out-of-state companies with tax incentives, they were thinking about beautification projects and homeowners and places where people could congregate.
“That’s the shift,” said Shane Barton, at the University of Kentucky. “How can we make our communities people-ready as opposed to industry- or investment-ready?”
Still, progress is uneven, and many small-town economies are frail. Self-reliance may take them only so far.
The drug problem rages on. Fentanyl seems to be mixed into everything on the street, creating staggering numbers of overdoses. On top of all this, a form of perverse gentrification has taken hold that’s peculiar to this birthplace of the opioid epidemic. Legions of national drug treatment centers catering to the addicts have moved to the region—sopping up cheap real estate and pricing lower-income buyers and start-ups out of the market.
But at this point, that seems like a minor, mostly surmountable hurdle, at least to the people here who have stopped waiting for outsiders—coal companies, big-box retailers, Frankfort, Washington—to save them.
That is definitely the way Stephanie Callahan, in Hazard, sees things.
Now in her early forties, Callahan, like Mandi Fugate Sheffel, was part of the generation consumed by Oxy. She got clean when she had a baby—this was 15 years ago—and built a career as a showroom saleswoman at a local furniture company. But she yearned to do something on her own.
She loved fashion. For two years, she had been running a side hustle out of her bedroom, selling plus-size clothes. She hated that she had to go to Lexington every time she needed a new top or skirt.
So, in the summer of 2021, Callahan quit her full-time job and rented a space in downtown Hazard that had once been a gym. Her father said she’d lost her mind, opening a women’s clothing store during Covid. She did it anyway, calling it Hot Mess Express, which is what her mother and friends often called her.
She showed them: in her first two years, Callahan had 2,000 repeat customers. She now has nine part-time employees and will soon open a men’s store.
It wasn’t just about the clothes. It was about people in Hazard, like so many towns, trying to find their way back to each other.
“When I was growing up, we had arcades, movie theaters, mom-and-pop restaurants,” Callahan said. Now, “there’s no place for people to go talk to each other.”
So, she put a brown leather couch, almost as an afterthought, in the middle of the store, intending it for men accompanying their wives and girlfriends to sit and scroll through their phones or read a magazine—kill time. Instead, it became the focal point of the store, and it made Hot Mess Express a community hangout as well as a women’s boutique. A little place, or nook, where people would say hi, catch up, laugh, hug, gossip.
“It’s comfortable,” Callahan told me, referring to the couch. “I have a photo of the mayor asleep on it.”
Sam Quinones is the author of four books, including his latest, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. You can follow him on X at @samquinones7.
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On Monday, Donald Trump took the oath of office — the first person to be sworn in as president while simultaneously hawking an eponymous meme coin.
Trump launched $TRUMP, a crypto token, on Friday night. Meme coins are crypto tokens tied to a celebrity or joke. The first and most famous is DOGE coin, a cryptocurrency centered around a famous image of a Shiba Inu dog. $TRUMP features an image of Trump during the assassination attempt last summer.
While meme coins are nominally tied to digital “artwork,” they function primarily as a speculative asset. Since many meme coins attempt to capitalize on online trends, they are known for extreme volatility. Hailey Welch, an online personality known as the “Hawk Tuah girl,” launched the “Hawk” meme coin in December. The Hawk coin’s value exploded shortly after launch, reaching a market cap of $490 million. But the price quickly collapsed. Today, the total value of all the 999 million Hawk coins is less than $30,000. You can buy 338 Hawk coins for less than one cent.
Trump is leveraging the prestige of the presidency and the global coverage of the inauguration to boost the price of $TRUMP. By Sunday evening, the price of one $TRUMP coin soared to over $75, putting the value of the 200 million $TRUMP coins in circulation at nearly $15 billion. By Monday afternoon, $TRUMP had lost about 40% of its value.
The primary beneficiary of this speculative activity is Trump himself. In a move that raised red flags even among crypto enthusiasts, 80% of all $TRUMP coins are reserved for a company owned by Trump. At its peak, the value of these coins exceeded $50 billion, making $TRUMP, which did not exist a few days ago, the dominant source of Trump’s wealth. The $TRUMP coins owned by Trump are currently locked, meaning they cannot be sold, but will be released in tranches over the next three years.
In 2016, Trump’s net worth was estimated to be about $3 billion. Before the launch of the $TRUMP, that had increased to around $7 billion, largely due to the public listing of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. Truth Social loses millions of dollars every quarter and has few users, but Trump’s fans keep its stock price elevated.
So Trump has a huge financial incentive to keep the price of $TRUMP elevated until he can sell his coins. For Trump, there is nothing but upside. He received the coins for free — whatever he can sell them for will be a windfall. Trump’s supporters, however, could suffer huge financial losses. By Monday afternoon, a single $TRUMP coin cost $40. People who buy these coins looking to turn a big profit could instead find themselves with massive losses.
A vehicle for corrupt foreign influence
$TRUMP does not only create problems for reckless Trump fans. It means that the White House is for sale. Anyone seeking to curry favor with Trump — including foreign governments — now has a vehicle to transfer a virtually unlimited amount of money to Trump by driving up the price of $TRUMP coins.
As with all crypto transactions, anyone can purchase $TRUMP anonymously. The only record involves a digital wallet with no public owner. This means a foreign entity could make a large purchase of $TRUMP coins — perhaps boosting $TRUMP’s value before Trump sold some of his holdings — and no one would know. It creates an unprecedented and completely opaque method to bribe the President of the United States.
“While it’s tempting to dismiss this as just another Trump spectacle, the launch of the official Trump token opens up a Pandora’s box of ethical and regulatory questions,” Justin d’Anethan, an independent crypto analyst, told Reuters.
This week, we started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so I hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.
Crypto companies under federal investigation boost $TRUMP
Thousands of meme coins are launched every month. The failure rate for meme coins is estimated at over 97%. With so much competition, it is hard to make a significant number of people become aware of a meme coin. Trump, as the President of the United States, solves that problem. But even once people discover a meme coin, it needs to be easy to buy and sell in order to sustain interest.
It is possible to buy and sell crypto assets without an intermediary. But most people buy and sell crypto through a handful of popular exchanges, which make the process easy and allow you to use cash and other assets to fund purchases.
Exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood can greatly increase awareness and demand for a meme coin. At the same time, they are not going to list every new meme coin that is issued — especially since many of them are scams.
But Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood all have made $TRUMP available to their users, dramatically increasing the number of buyers, and sending its price higher. And they aren’t just quietly listing $TRUMP. They are promoting $TRUMP to their user base.
Improving your relationship with the president is a good idea for any business. But these companies have even stronger motivations. Coinbase is currently being prosecuted by the SEC for “operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.” The SEC is also prosecuting Kraken for similar alleged activities. Robinhood has not been charged but received a “Wells Notice” from the SEC last May, indicating enforcement action is coming.
The crypto industry is reportedly hoping that, under the Trump administration, the SEC will either end their prosecutions and investigations or offer a favorable settlements.
More broadly, these companies are counting on the Trump administration to allow them to operate legally. The $TRUMP coin allows Trump to make billions from a more permissive regulatory environment. It transforms the presidency from a public trust into a tool for personal enrichment.
Yesterday, we saw the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaug…
It’s Tuesday, January 21. I’m Olly Wiseman and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. It’s good to be back.
Today we answer the big questions about the transfer of power in Washington. Among them: Will Trump fight lawfare with lawfare? Will TikTok survive? Is neoliberalism dead? Is Trump cool? Does that even matter? Are we at war with Panama now? And: that hat.
But first: the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaugural address and more like a State of the Union / campaign speech mashup. Ignoring unifying inaugural speech traditions stretching back to George Washington, he trashed his political opponents and touted new policies that would bring about a “golden age.”
His proposals were a Trumpian mix of serious (action on immigration and inflation) and, well, strange. It’s the Gulf of America now, and we’re “taking back” the Panama Canal, baby!
His promised day-one executive orders included:
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Declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, unlocking federal funding for a border wall, reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, and designating drug cartels as “global terrorists.”
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Cutting regulations around oil and gas production by declaring another national emergency, this one on energy. (“We will drill, baby, drill.”)
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Ending the environmental rules he calls “Biden’s electric vehicle mandate.”
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Establishing an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs.
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And ending the “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” (You read about Trump’s repudiation of gender ideology in the federal government first in The Free Press on Sunday.)
Later in the day, Trump signed these orders. He also pardoned members of the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. Trump’s January 6 pardons went further than his closest allies appear to have anticipated. Earlier this month, J.D. Vance said that those who committed violence during the riot “obviously” should not be pardoned. But Trump has commuted the sentences of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Back to Trump’s speech. If there was a theme, it was that his own astonishing political comeback portends a national revival, one that he’ll deliver.
“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”
Trump went further. His comeback, and his country’s, he claimed, weren’t just linked but were providential. Recalling the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, he said: “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Gone was the grim “American Carnage” theme of his first inaugural speech. He spoke of the many challenges that “will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.”
It is a promise both populist and popular, a reminder of why Trump won.
It is also, as my colleague Peter Savodnik argues in his column today, the death knell of neoliberalism and the end of cool.
Here’s Peter: Trump’s critics, “the so-called progressive elites, are howling at the idea that this chump, who is so very unserious, is The One who will restore our seriousness. They miss the point. Only the brawling, bumbling ringleader of the great circus that is today’s Republican Party could break open our sclerotic overclass and lay it bare for the whole republic to see not simply its emptiness but its rot.”
Read Peter’s article, “Trump Is Uncool. And That’s a Good Thing.”
Joe Biden’s Unpardonable Last Act
Another promise Trump made was to “rebalance” the scales of justice. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department of our government will end,” he said in his inaugural address. This would normally sound like a partisan gripe, if it weren’t for the final presidential acts of his predecessor, writes Eli Lake in The Free Press.
Just moments earlier, Joe Biden had issued sweeping preemptive pardons for his siblings and their spouses. The outgoing president did the same for some of his successor’s high-profile opponents, including Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney. The level of clemency is without precedent, writes Eli, and inconsistent with Biden’s 2020 promise to uphold the rule of law. Indeed, four years ago Biden expressed his concern that Trump would pardon his own political cronies.
Trump now faces a choice: continue Biden’s erosion of norms, or end the cycle of lawfare. Which will it be?
Read Eli’s full report on Biden’s final act as president—and how Trump might respond.
TikTok on the Clock
The first big internal MAGA dustup of Trump’s second term centers on TikTok, the Chinese-owned social network. Congress passed legislation that forced either the ban or the sale of the app, but on Sunday Trump gave TikTok an eleventh-hour reprieve announcing his intent to keep the app alive for 90 days. Hours after going dark, the short-video platform blinked back on.
This was welcome news to the crowd at a TikTok-sponsored inauguration party Sunday evening. Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold was on the scene and spoke to influencers who say: “We the people are for TikTok.” Read her full dispatch here.
Meanwhile, Joe Lonsdale, a prominent Silicon Valley supporter of Donald Trump, argues that the new president’s TikTok maneuvers undermine the rule of law. Now that Congress and the Supreme Court have weighed in, it doesn’t matter what Trump thinks of the TikTok ban. “The law must take effect,” writes Joe. “Because in our republic, it is the Congress that writes the law. If President Trump disagrees, he can try to change Congress’s mind.”
Read Joe Lonsdale’s op-ed: “Mr. President, Don’t Abandon the Rule of Law to Save TikTok.”
Fashion Police: Inauguration Edition
Okay, now the important stuff: the outfits. Suzy Weiss answers some of the really pressing inauguration questions: How did Melania pull off a hat that obscured half her face? Was there a hidden message in Trump’s choice of tie? And Lauren Sanchez’s white lace corset under a blazer: inappropriate or awesome? (Answer: both.) Read Suzy’s full fashion report here.
(Of course, the best-dressed crowd in D.C. this past weekend came to the party we threw. Read about that here.)
More Notes on the Inauguration. . .
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Did the inauguration really need to be inside? Freezing temperatures forced proceedings indoors for the first time in forty years. But America’s ruling class wasn’t always so sensitive. As my colleague Chuck Lane points out, yesterday’s weather, frigid as it was, couldn’t hold an icicle to the 30-below wind chill at Ulysses S. Grant’s second inauguration on March 4, 1873. Chuck describes the frosty scene at that evening’s inaugural ball, held in a hangar-like temporary pavilion, in his book The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction: “Dignitaries gamely shuffled across the dance floor in their overcoats, as horn and tuba players squeaked out music through the frozen valves of their instruments. Dozens of birdcages dangled from the ceiling; the canaries inside were supposed to accompany the orchestra. But the cold was so intense that the birds shivered, tucked their beaks under their wings, and then began to drop dead.”
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In the beginning—i.e., last Friday—there was the $TRUMP meme coin. It’s kinda sorta like Bitcoin, only Trumpier. On the day it was issued, as traders anticipated the new president’s inauguration, it rose from $10 to $75, giving it a total value of more than $10 billion—billions, we should point out, backed by nothing but Trump’s considerable celebrity. It was yet another signal that his administration would embrace crypto. Then came the $MELANIA meme coin. Weirdly, its arrival caused the $TRUMP coin to drop down to $40. Then $TRUMP rose again in anticipation of the inauguration. Then, both the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins fell by 30 percent as he gave his inaugural address. Strange. Or maybe not. The volatility of meme coins is a given—that’s kinda the point for traders—and anticipation is always a more powerful driver than the actual event. What does the future hold for $TRUMP and $MELANIA? Probably more extreme volatility. But maybe people will figure out the coins’ value is built on air and they’ll collapse—at which point, maybe the president might decide to regulate crypto after all.
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Indicted New York mayor Eric Adams ditched MLK Day celebrations in his city to attend the president’s inauguration. It’s the latest act of Adams’ MAGA charm offensive, which has included a trip to Mar-a-Lago and a shift in his position on immigration, saying he is open to a rollback of sanctuary city policies. Many speculate Adams—who faces federal bribery and fraud charges—is angling for a pardon. Whatever Adams’ next chapter, his eyebrows will still be flawless.
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Carrie Underwood improvised an a cappella performance of “America the Beautiful” after technical difficulties nixed her backing track. “You know the words—help me out here,” the country singer said, before launching into the patriotic anthem. . . and nailing it.
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