“Whac-A-Mole”

“Whac-A-Mole” is the expression used in Dopesick for a drug market in which removing one dealer does not remove the conditions that sustain dealing. By 2014, heroin sales had become established in both Roanoke’s suburban subdivisions and its poorer neighborhoods. Police and prosecutors could make arrests and seize large quantities, but other sellers surfaced quickly, while overdose deaths continued. The metaphor gives this repetition a simple shape: each apparent victory is followed by another dealer rising into view.

The image and its immediate meaning

The chapter titled Whac-A-Mole introduces the expression through a changing local market. Its largest sellers were no longer necessarily elaborate, felony-convicted operators with multiple cars and hired couriers. Many were local users, often women, sent to purchase heroin from an out-of-state bulk dealer in exchange for a share. Their position as users and sellers, and their ability to move through ordinary communities, made them difficult to catch. The business did not depend on a single conspicuous organization that could be dismantled at once.

In 2015, prosecutor Andrew Bassford described the cycle directly: “You whack one [dealer], and the others just pop right up, like Whac-A-Mole,” The phrase turns a sequence of investigations and arrests into a recurring pattern rather than a final contest with a single opponent. A successful arrest can be real and consequential, yet it does not guarantee that the supply or market will stay disrupted. The image’s force comes from that mismatch between the discrete action of enforcement and the persistence of the system around it.

A network that replaces its sellers

The case of Ashlyn Keikilani Kessler makes the pattern personal and concrete. A prominent long-haul courier, she transported large quantities while in the grip of severe addiction; at its peak, she was using fifty to sixty bags a day. Her prosecutor said her body metabolized the drug unusually well, and she reported never having overdosed. Her capacity to keep transporting heroin and survive heavy use made her, in the prosecutor’s account, an unusually effective courier—not a sign that the trade was safe.

Bassford prosecuted Ashlyn and her dealer in 2015, after first prosecuting another dealer from southeast Roanoke. That earlier operation involved a network of relatives and neighbors who took turns meeting a supplier in a Burlington Coat Factory parking lot in Claymont, Delaware. They moved 60 grams of heroin every two weeks for distribution and use, and the operation cleared nearly $60,000 a month. The details show how a supply chain could be assembled from people with local ties and repeated trips, rather than from one permanent, easily isolated seller.

Ashlyn’s imprisonment did not end the sequence. Bassford said he subsequently “whacked four more” dealers, all connected in some way with the networks around her and the earlier operation. That recurrence is the metaphor’s central evidence: each prosecution could remove individuals, but other sellers remained available within overlapping connections. The language does not make arrests meaningless; it marks the limit of treating each arrest as if it could, by itself, end the trade.

Why the market returns

The account identifies persistent demand as a reason the replacements kept coming. Heroin use spread through what the book describes as an evangelical pattern, with users recruiting new users. A major bust could produce a short interruption, but not lasting scarcity. Isaac Van Patten, a criminologist and data analyst for Roanoke city police, said that a drug seizure investigators had worked toward for perhaps a year might create a market vacuum lasting only five to seven days. The money involved was too vast, he argued, for such an intervention to stamp out the trade.

Van Patten also pointed beyond the city, describing cartel production in western Mexico, South America, and Afghanistan and estimating annual profits above $300 billion. His account places local sellers within a much larger supply system whose reach exceeded the capacity of a single city’s police force. He also described the limited cooperation of supplier nations. The metaphor therefore points not just to the speed with which local dealers can be replaced, but to the distance between local enforcement and the wider networks feeding the market.

A market crossing social boundaries

The replacement cycle also accompanied heroin’s movement across class and neighborhood lines. Van Patten called Roanoke’s most discreet users the café crowd: privileged and upper-middle-class people whose use could remain less visible. Suburban users such as Ashlyn eventually connected with former OxyContin users from the working-class southeast who already had ties to illicit networks. What had begun in the suburbs as a fashionable drug that users believed they could control did not remain socially separate. Van Patten observed that affluent young people spiraled downward alongside everyone else until the distinction between them was no longer apparent.

The image grows sharper against the changing drug supply. Chris Perkins recalled an earlier heroin market in which dealers cut the product with baby powder; by the period described, fentanyl had replaced that mild adulterant, often with lethal consequences. Roanoke police seized 560 grams of heroin in 2015, which the account equates to 18,666 doses. The product came not only through former crack dealers diversifying their sales but also through subdealers. When police removed a source, a brief delay might follow before another appeared. Meanwhile, overdoses accumulated, even before the worst fentanyl spike arrived. In this context, Whac-A-Mole describes more than an exasperating rhythm of arrests: it names the growing danger of a market that replenished itself faster than each intervention could contain it.