His last surviving son, Roger T. Winemiller, 35, spent years using prescription pain pills, heroin
and methamphetamines, and was jailed for a year on drug charges.
But Mr. Winemiller says his first priority is “to keep the land intact.” He worries about what could happen to the business if he turned over his share of the farm
and his son relapsed — or worse — a year or a decade down the line.
They get overdose calls for people living inside the Edenton Rural School, a shuttered brick schoolhouse where
officers have cleared away signs of meth production and found the flotsam of drug use on the floors.
Volunteer-run heroin support groups are popping up in rural towns where clinics and drug treatment centers are an hour’s drive away, and broaching public conversations about addiction and death
that close-knit neighbors and even some families of the dead would prefer to keep out of view.
His son talked about an intervention the two of them had staged just down the road a few nights earlier — talking about their own losses
and the younger Roger’s treatment — after a 33-year-old neighbor overdosed at his family’s home.