Hub and Spoke Audio Collective

This is Rumble Strip I'm Erica Heilman and just a quick warning

this show contains explicit descriptions of active drug addiction, so it might not be for everyone.

I think you'll find most addicts aren't necessarily in it for the drug.

They're in it for the drug. They're in it for the peace, the quiet.

You ever see somebody not enough, like drilling on themselves, not enough.

You know how much money they spend and how much effort goes into being in that condition? It's black. There's no dreaming, there's no thinking, there's no nothing. It is quiet. It's remarkably peaceful

I love it. I don't care what anybody says

It's peaceful. There's just a lot of fucked up shit to get to that point.

That's Mark. He got addicted to opiates after being prescribed Vicodin following back surgery.

There are all kinds of reasons why addiction happens. No one does it on purpose,

and addiction is not discriminating. It's like some terrible lottery. It happens to people

with money and without money, people just starting out in life and people with kids and thriving businesses,

people from cities and people from small towns, but this isn't a story about how addiction starts, or even how it ends.

Last year I made a story about my private investigator friend Susan Randall, after her office

was robbed in the middle of the day in downtown Burlington

by a woman with a very serious addiction problem.

She walked into Susan's office while people were working there and loaded a bag full of electronics and left.

After I made that story I kept thinking about the woman.

I know she was stealing in order to trade or sell the electronics for drugs. But where was she actually coming from that day? Where

was she going? The world of active addiction is a kind of world underneath the world,

with its own rules, its own schedules, but to most people

...