Like Every Mom

The New York Times has a good-sized article profiling Eugenia Phair, recently released from jail, focusing on her brief period of success as an OxyContin dealer on the Lummi Nation near the Canadian border. The section where she describes how she'd start the day just "like every mom" is particularly stunning.

Seattlest wonders most about the mules—the women who cross the border, head to downtown Vancouver to purchase the drugs, and then stash them in their bodies to bring them back for sale at over 100% markup by Phair (some days she was clearing as much as $15,000 pure profit).

Is there a large group of them, so that no woman is ever crossing the border that frequently? Apparently, rival Lummi drug dealers each have their own group of women who run the drugs, and are constantly trying to steal them from each other. We just don't see how the border patrol types aren't recognizing the usual suspects, since the Oxycontin trade on reservations in Washington (and elsewhere) is clearly known to be on the rise by law enforcement types. But since Phair was paying them $600 per trip, and that was more than they'd get for an entire month from public assistance, perhaps they were only crossing the border a few times a month.

The NYT article did not make any efforts to romanticize Phair's situation, though the author did seem subtly sympathetic. Now that she is out of jail, her drunk father (and former right-hand man) is taking odds on how soon she'll be back in business.