When the heroin epidemic descends on the family farm
BLANCHESTER, Ohio — A life of farming taught Roger Winemiller plenty about harsh twists of fate: hailstorms and drought, ragweed infestations and jittery crop prices. He hadn’t bargained on heroin.
Then, in March 2016, Winemiller’s daughter, Heather Himes, 31, died of an opioid overdose at the family farmhouse, inside a first-floor bathroom overlooking fields of corn and soybeans. Winemiller was the one who unlocked the bathroom door and found her slumped over, a syringe by her side.
She came to stay at the farmhouse a day after three acquaintances of hers were arrested on heroin charges at a motel in the nearby town of Hillsboro. He said he went to the garage to get her a Coke, she excused herself to the bathroom, and he was overcome by a terrible dread when he sat back down in the living room.
“I knocked on the door, and there was no answer,” he said.
Nine months later, Winemiller’s oldest son, Eugene, who once drove trucks and tractors on the family’s 3,400-acre farm, overdosed at his mother’s home. Family members and medics had been able to revive him after earlier overdoses.
Not this time. Overdoses are churning through agricultural pockets of America like a plow through soil, tearing at rural communities and posing a new threat to the generational ties of families like the Winemillers. Farm bureaus’ attention to seed, fertilizer and subsidies has been diverted to discussions of overdoses. Volunteer-run heroin support groups are popping up in rural towns where clinics and drug treatment
centers are an hour’s drive away, and broaching public conversations about addiction and death that close-knit neighbors and even some families of the dead would prefer to keep out of view.
And at the end of a long gravel driveway, Winemiller has been thinking about the uncertain seasons ahead. His last surviving biological son, Roger T. Winemiller, 35, spent years using prescription pain pills, heroin and methamphetamines, and was jailed for a year on drug charges. He is
now in treatment and living with his father.
The son dreams of taking over the farm someday. The father is wary.
“Would I like to have one of my kids working the farm, side by side, carrying my load when I can’t?” Winemiller said. “Yes. But I’m a realist.”
Winemiller and a cousin inherited the farm in 1993 when an uncle died, and they own and run the business together. His surviving son has not used drugs for two months and says he is committed to recovery.
But Winemiller said his priority is “to keep the land intact.” He worries about what could happen to the business if he turned over his share of the farm and his son relapsed — or worse — a year or a decade down the line.
He also keeps a pouch of overdose-treating nasal spray in the living room now, just in case.
The Winemillers live on the eastern edge of Clermont County, an hour east of Cincinnati, where a suburban quilt of bedroom towns, office parks and industry thins into woods and farmland, mostly for corn and soybeans.
Drug overdoses here have nearly tripled since 1999, and the state as a whole has been ravaged. In Ohio, 2,106 people died of opioid overdoses in 2014, more than in any other state, according to an analysis of the most recent federal data by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In Wayne Township, where the Winemillers and about 4,900 other people live, the fire department answered 18 overdose calls last year. Firefighters said the spikes and lulls in their overdose calls gave them a feel for when particularly noxious batches of drugs were brought out to the countryside from Cincinnati or Dayton.
“I don’t think we’re winning the battle,” said David Moulden, the fire chief. “It gives you a hopelessness.”