New Jersey is a destination and supply link in the heroin routes traced in Dopesick, connecting East Coast cities to Roanoke’s market. Paterson appears among the places where users could seek a new supply; Newark becomes especially consequential in Ashlyn Kessler’s account of being recruited to transport heroin. These journeys make New Jersey part of the book’s geography of dependence: distance is measured not only in miles, but in the next trip needed to avoid withdrawal or finance another dose.

An East Coast Supply Network

The book places New Jersey within a regional network rather than treating it as an isolated source. After dealers were arrested, user-sellers still traveled to obtain more heroin, making runs to Baltimore, Richmond, or Paterson, New Jersey. Their purpose differed from that of larger traffickers: they were not seeking to build fortunes, but trying to keep from getting dopesick. The route persisted because demand outlasted the removal of individual suppliers.

Elsewhere, young people from Roanoke drove past Woodstock toward Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Newark, while others took the Chinatown bus to New York City. They could buy fifty bags for $100 and resell them in Roanoke for six to eight times the cost. The account shows how accessible supplies in distant cities could support local resale, turning a journey into a means of funding continued use as well as a business.

Newark and Ashlyn Kessler

Newark becomes more than a point on a map in the account of Ashlyn Kessler. After losing her job, she stole from relatives to buy drugs, including credit cards, checks, and heirloom jewelry belonging to her grandmother, Lee Miller. Her grandparents had paid for treatment programs that she often left after only a few days, and sometimes gave her money for black-market Suboxone because, without it, she might turn to heroin when she became sick.

The 2013 Nissan Sentra her grandparents bought for her became the means by which a dealer enlisted her to travel between Roanoke and New Jersey. The dealer had a Newark connection: a relative with access to a bulk supplier. At first the arrangement involved three bundles, or thirty bags; later, Ashlyn and the dealer bought fifty-bag bricks for $100 and sold them in Roanoke for six or seven times that amount. The fourteen-hour round trip was repeated three or four times a week.

The trips exposed the conflict between Ashlyn’s role as a courier and her dependence on the heroin she carried. The dealer usually sent his girlfriend to watch her, since Ashlyn injected from their shared supply at rest stops on the drive back to Roanoke. Her polished appearance and nice car helped her pass as someone who did not fit the expected image of a drug courier, while her craving made her unlikely to be mistaken for an undercover officer by sellers in Newark.

A Route That Reproduces Demand

New Jersey’s significance lies in the movement between supply and need. For Roanoke’s user-sellers, a trip to a city such as Paterson could mean another batch; for Ashlyn, the Newark connection made repeated transport possible even as she used the product herself. In both accounts, trafficking and dependence are not separate processes: the attempt to obtain or sell heroin feeds the next need for it.

The book’s wider account of Baltimore helps place these journeys in an East Coast corridor. Baltimore had long served as a staging area for drug movement, with Interstate 95 linking it to cities from Miami to Bangor, Maine; the route’s successive nicknames reflected changing drugs, eventually including the Heroin Highway. Against that regional backdrop, New Jersey is one of the places through which heroin reached users and local markets, while Ashlyn’s repeated Newark runs show the personal cost embedded in that circulation.