Recycling Lives

     Near the end of his trash collection route in the Gold Coast of suburban New Jersey Tommy Robinson stumbled over the doubled-packed trash bag–knocking its contents across the roadside on Commonwealth Turn.

     For the third time that week the objects spilling out of the polyethylene garbage can liner stopped the veteran sanitation man in his tracks.

      Of course, in his 30 years on the job, both in the most well-healed area of suburbia and in the most rundown areas of the Garden State’s urban ghettos, discovering plastic hypodermic needles used to help heroin addicts to get their latest high did not greatly surprise the trash collector.

      The size of the discoverry knocked Tommy off his feet this time– hundreds of narcotics injection tools he found on the property of estates in one of New Jersey’s, and the nation’s, most high end suburbs.

       From his customer registrations, he also found that the mansions from which he had made his collections during the last few weeks belonged to some of the top surgeons in the county’s most highly-regarded medical center. These guys, even if they were stupid enough or had fallen so far, should have known better than to so carelessly dispose of the evidence.

      “I’ve heard that kids from down the hill have begun using the driveways of these showplace homes as shooting galleries because the they believe the bigshot MDs who live in the palaces at the top of these long driveways either can’t see all the way to the bottom of the hills or don’t care to bother with the riff raff, just as long as we came alone twice a week to clear away the evidence,” he thought, “but you would think the local cops would have busted the addicts and pushers by now and brought the bigshots the negative publicity they avoid like the plague.”

      Turns out the mansion owners knew more than Tommy imagined–they, in fact, supplied the “product” needed to continue the local drug trade–from the hospital’s own dispensary.

        Even with the six-figure salaries, these physicians couldn’t afford to maintain these elaborate homesteads on the hills, buy uber-luxury cars every year and hold their wild parties every week. These extras required substantial extra income. That’s why the doctors signed on as suppliers to the local addiction-production industry.

        The entire heroin pipeline had carefully mapped out its strategy, up to now, including payoffs to law enforcement to keep its operation secret, and undisturbed.

          They didn’t count on the fact, however, that Tommy had pledged to work for the rest of his life to save the lives of kids like the ones who had wasted away in the ghetto in which he grew up and now laid dead along the roadways on the fringes of one of America’s most wealthy areas. 

         Additionally, the drug plague had claimed the life of his 17-year-old brother, Jimmy, only five years before.

         Jimmy had fallen prey to the glitz and glamour of the fast life promised by the merchants of death, who had persuaded him to inject their poison into his veins. Finally, he could not escape the iron grip of the deadly narcotic.

         Thinking back to the suffering of his brother, Tommy told his co-workers, “Kids from areas like my old hood should no longer have their lives wasted away so that some uber-rich suburbanites can destroy these children to allow the pushers and their supporters to reside in palaces at the top of the hill and clmb to the top rung of the social ladder.” 

          With Tommy’s retirement from the sanitation industry six months away, he resolved to use a good chunk of his lifelong savings to help permanently shut down the drug pipeline. Careful investment had resulted in a nestegg amounting to about $1 million.

          He used his savings to establish the Recycling Human Potential Foundation.  The foundation worked with the top educational and medical minds in the country to offer to pay for complete rehabilitation services and full tuition at a community college for any youth who signed an agreement to bring one other addict into the program once they graduated,

            The former trash collector also enlisted the help of the Drug Enforcement Administration in breaking up the corruption-laden hospital-law enforcement chain. 

         The DEA gave the destruction of the drug supermarket its top priority, setting up a huge interagency task force to cut off the tentacles of the far-reaching operation.

         Hundreds of federal agents from across the country joined forces with Tommy, his fellow foundation leaders and right-thinking hospital administrators and local law enforcement to cut off the corruption and stop the flow of narcotics down from the hills into the nearby city’s ghettos.

           They busted narcotics operations at every level, arresting pushers operating in palatial estates, darkened alleys behind police stations and hospital dispensaries. Even their expensive luxury automobiles and other millionaires’ toys financed by the operation did not escape the long arm of the law.

           Those involved in pedaling the poison didn’t go down without a fight,  and Tommy suffered a number of severe injuries and close brushes with death at the hands of the gangsters’ enforcers. 

      Yet, he and his foundation didn’t give up. They rescued over 200 youngsters over 10 years and resolved to continue the fight until they saw the drug lords locked behind the bars of the state prison or a federal penitentury.

            The drug cartels recruited an army of attorneys in an effort to tie up the work of the foundation and its law enforcement partners in the courts.  

            Breaking through the legal spiderwebs created by the pushers and their supporters,Tommy and his partners refused to surrender. After many months tied up in litigation, they saw far more success than any previous effort to rid the area of the narcotics plague that had controlled it for decades.

             The former trash collector felt Jimmy smiling down on him as he led his foundation in recycling many previously hopeless victims of the heroin trade into productive human beings and disposed of the trash that had destroyed his brother and so many others.