"Da Di Shu" Style Anti-Drug Enforcement

Whac-A-Mole drug policy names a recurring failure in the response to heroin: police remove one dealer or supply source, a brief gap follows, and another appears to meet persistent demand. The book uses the pattern to question whether arrests can keep pace with a market that replenishes itself, and to contrast that approach with the difficult work of connecting people to treatment. It also shows that the consequences of drug enforcement are not distributed evenly, even as the commercial and regulatory forces behind the opioid crisis remain harder to confront.

The Enforcement Cycle

By the mid-2000s, the heroin trade in Roanoke had changed from a largely hidden activity associated with a small group of users into a market that reached new populations. Earlier, heroin users were commonly imagined as isolated and withdrawn, and the drug was widely treated as an inner-city problem. The skin-popping weathermen incident briefly drew public attention, but journalists, including the book’s narrator, initially treated it as an anomaly rather than a warning of broader change. Heroin had become more visible, and the old assumptions about who used it no longer described the city’s reality.

The metaphor takes concrete form in the account of enforcement against Ashlyn Kessler’s network. Andrew Bassford, who prosecuted her and her dealer in 2015, had already prosecuted a dealer from southeast Roanoke, where heroin had first taken hold in the city. After Ashlyn went to jail, Bassford said that he went after four more dealers connected to the same networks. The succession is the point: each arrest could remove a person from the market, but it did not end the underlying trade.

That replacement cycle could be rapid. Roanoke police seized 560 grams of heroin in 2015, an amount the book equates to 18,666 doses. Chris Perkins described the supply as extensive and distributed not only by former crack dealers diversifying their business but also by subordinate sellers. Removing one source could leave a short delay before another emerged; meanwhile, overdoses continued. The book presents enforcement as a response continually chasing a market whose scale and adaptability exceed the reach of individual arrests.

Demand, Supply, and the Limits of Arrests

The cycle was sustained by more than the number of sellers. The book describes users recruiting other users, while the high profits and global supply made local disruption temporary. A major bust could create a market vacuum lasting only five to seven days. In that interval, enforcement had achieved a visible result, but not a durable change in access to heroin. The image of a game in which another target appears as soon as one is struck captures the imbalance between repeated police action and a continuing source of demand.

Fentanyl made that imbalance more dangerous. By 2015, it had replaced milder adulterants in some heroin supplies, and counterfeit pills sold as Xanax or oxycodone could also contain fentanyl. Perkins anticipated that potent blends would draw teenagers who could use them without first confronting the stigma some associated with injecting. The risk was not confined to an established population of heroin users: a changing product could reach people through different routes, while police seized supplies and further overdoses accumulated.

The book also places this market against the longer path from prescription opioids to heroin. In the 1995 review of OxyContin, FDA examiner Curtis Wright had been presented with information that crushing the tablets could release the drug immediately, that withdrawal symptoms had occurred during trials, and that a substantial portion of a crushed pill could be recovered for injection. Later scrutiny also uncovered private meetings between regulators and pharmaceutical executives, industry funding of pain advocacy, and lobbying during the federal case against Purdue. These episodes are not identical to street-level dealer replacement, but they widen the question the metaphor raises: a response focused on successive sellers does not by itself address how drug products are approved, promoted, or supplied.

Unequal Reach

The book challenges the idea that the limits of arrest apply equally to everyone. The refrain that society cannot arrest its way out of the crisis was often directed at white opioid users who dealt drugs or committed property offenses to stave off withdrawal. The narrator contrasts that sympathy with the imprisonment of Ronnie Jones for armed heroin distribution and with the broader disproportionate incarceration of Black and Hispanic people for drug offenses. Jones’s history of repeated imprisonment illustrates the durable consequences of criminalization: a felony record can obstruct access to ordinary employment and help reproduce a cycle of incarceration and joblessness.

The account also points to unequal exposure to prescription opioids. Data discussed in the book showed that doctors prescribed painkillers to people of color at lower rates than to white patients, reflecting clinicians’ mistrust that patients of color would misuse them. The resulting pattern was stark: while overdose deaths among young white people rose sharply between 2002 and 2014, the rate among people of color was relatively unchanged. This is not presented as evidence that enforcement alone caused the racial difference in addiction. Rather, unequal prescribing and unequal punishment shape who is exposed to opioids, who is treated as a patient, and who is treated as a criminal. A critique of arrest-based policy is incomplete if it recognizes one group’s vulnerability while leaving another group’s punishment unquestioned.

Alternatives and Their Constraints

The book sets the arrest cycle beside efforts to make treatment a more immediate alternative. Chris Perkins developed the Hope Initiative in Roanoke as a local version of the Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative. Its intended model paired people seeking help with trained volunteers, or angels, who could guide them toward treatment and draw on housing, mental-health, and employment resources. The program was to be based at the Bradley Free Clinic, serving a working-poor neighborhood that had become a heroin hot spot. Instead of treating every encounter as an occasion for handcuffs, the initiative aimed to connect people with care.

The early results revealed how little an alternative could accomplish without capacity behind it. Twenty-two people came to the Hope Initiative in its first month. Volunteers stayed in contact with people who repeatedly sought help, but none had entered residential treatment, and only a handful had obtained outpatient medication-assisted treatment. The shortage of providers, detox services, treatment beds, and straightforward referral routes turned an offer of help into a difficult sequence of calls, delays, and handoffs.

The same barriers appeared in hospitals. Psychologist Cheri Hartman and an Ontario researcher, Kuehl, worked toward a smoother transfer from emergency care to outpatient medication-assisted treatment and counseling. They faced bureaucratic, financial, and legal obstacles, including too few providers and beds. In one transfer, Janine Underwood helped keep John in detox for an extra day and coordinated the next steps with his family and an out-of-state treatment center. The episode shows the urgency of a short opportunity to accept care, but also the dependence of that opportunity on people navigating a fragmented system for him.

Meaning and Limits of the Metaphor

Whac-A-Mole describes a mechanism, not a complete explanation of addiction or a solution to it. Arrests can disrupt a network and remove particular dealers, but the book’s examples show how rapidly other sellers can fill a gap when demand and supply persist. The metaphor is most forceful when it exposes the mismatch between the repeated, visible act of arrest and the less visible conditions that sustain the market: access to treatment, the changing potency of the drug supply, and the distinct paths by which communities encounter opioids and the criminal justice system.

The alternative described in the book is not simply a kinder slogan. It requires practical capacity—staff, treatment places, referral procedures, and coordination among police, hospitals, clinics, and social services. The Hope Initiative’s first-month figures make the difference plain: people could arrive asking for help while the services needed to carry that request forward remained out of reach. The book therefore uses the game’s endlessly reappearing targets not to excuse dealers or dismiss enforcement, but to show why arrests alone cannot produce a lasting exit from the crisis.