North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect

The North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect in 1994 as part of the economic transformation that hollowed out Martinsville, Virginia, once an industrial powerhouse. The book links the agreement’s aftermath to the departure of textile work and places that loss within a wider contraction involving furniture manufacturing, automation, and the decline of coal. It presents deindustrialization as a condition that intensified hardship—not as a single cause of the opioid crisis, which also depended on the growing supply of painkillers.

Martinsville’s industrial contraction

For much of the twentieth century, Martinsville was packed with textile and furniture factories and had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation. In the wake of the agreement, textile work moved to Honduras and Mexico; furniture jobs later went to China. Nearly half the city’s jobs disappeared. The account makes the scale of that change tangible through the loss of work in industries that had sustained the city, rather than treating globalization as an abstract shift in trade.

Economic consequences

The contraction was visible in the labor force and in household insecurity. Bassett Furniture’s chief executive described dismissing about 8,000 workers from his payroll as necessary for the company’s survival. By 2012, Martinsville, with a population of about 13,000, had recorded Virginia’s highest unemployment rate for twelve years. In Martinsville and surrounding Henry County, unemployment exceeded 20 percent, food-stamp claims had more than tripled, and disability rates had risen 60.4 percent. These figures reflect the cumulative effects of globalization, automation, and declining coal—not NAFTA alone.

Place in the opioid-crisis narrative

The book places Martinsville’s job losses within a broader account of rural distress: shrinking work opportunities accompanied rising crime, food insecurity, and disability claims. It describes the collapse of work and the growth of disability alongside the flood of painkillers promoted by pharmaceutical companies and approved by regulators. In that analysis, economic dislocation created part of the crisis’s groundwork, while the expansion of opioids supplied a distinct and necessary force. The agreement’s significance is therefore structural: it marks one stage in the weakening of local employment and security, not a direct or sufficient explanation for addiction and overdose.