The slumbering poor

The scientific consensus is that thanks to a broad expansion of the federal vaccine program, sleep is nearly cured. Roughly 85 percent of Americans are capable of operating at somewhere from 0 to 30 minutes a week, and only 3 percent have proved resistant to the combination of synapse incisions and time-released hormones that greatly reduce or altogether eliminate the sleeping urge and ability. A handful – mostly concentrated in Southern right-Evangelical communities – are granted religious exemptions. Of the 10 percent of the population with diagnosed mood disorders like Stoker's, the vast majority are prescribed less than 90 minutes weekly. But these rosy numbers hide a persistent underclass for whom sleep is everything from medicine to recreation.

As quotas have lowered in recent years, restrictions on sleeplike activities have loosened. After some debate, meditation was removed from the DSM-V in 2013, and the current wisdom suggests that within reasonable limits, it bears little resemblance to a traditional unconscious state. To politicians, however, it is something of a Rubicon. Statistically, there is little evidence for conservative claims that meditation functions as a "gateway drug," especially given its popularity among the middle and upper productivity quintiles. Social progressives have accused them of carrying out a class war by proxy, citing the exceptions for largely upper-middle-class tantric variants in proposed bans on public classes.

But the underlying argument – that current laws and DEA action have failed to contain an epidemic among both urban and rural poor – is more difficult to refute. While partisan think-tanks produce wildly different numbers, a 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey found that 11 million people at or below the poverty line slept over five hours per week – and a stunning 45 percent of those are classified as morbidly narcoleptic, with some sleeping as much as five hours a night. In Detroit, America's most sleep-stricken city, approximately 1,000 infants a year do not receive synaptic therapy until six months of age or later, although the CDC notes that the long-term developmental effects on the waggishly named "slumberkind" remain unclear.

"They don't have time to wait for muscle therapy or anti-psychotics."

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), author of the Promoting Alert Industrial Development (PAID) Act, blames Congressional gridlock and a lack of health care facilities for the poorest Americans. "It's a vicious cycle," she said in a phone interview. "Some of these people have four or five jobs – they're working 23 hours a day, they don't have time to wait in line for muscle therapy or anti-psychotics. If you can get knockoff Ambia on the street for a few dollars, what are you going to pick?"

The PAID Act passed committee in June, but amnesty provisions for mothers who sleep with small children have derailed its progress. North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory has threatened to file suit over the exemption, which he calls "reckless and ridiculous." McCrory ran on an emphatically anti-sleep platform in 2012, in part because of his state's proximity to West Virginia, whose position as a pharmaceuticals hub has made it a nodal point in the DEA's crackdown effort. Companies like Mylan Pharmaceuticals, the country's largest manufacturer of generics, have stepped up background checks and issued harsher punishments to workers found smuggling out pills.

"I could watch the clock tick by every single minute."

One of those workers is Lyndie Platt, a former quality-assurance technician and mother of two. Platt, 31, had worked at various facilities for 10 years before being caught with a packet of synaptic stimulant zolpilam wrapped in paper towels and concealed in her shoe. She had never, she says, even intended to use them, but the recent death of her partner left her in heavy debt. With little chance of a promotion, it was her first attempt at earning outside income – and her last real job.

"I was proud of how long I'd been there, you know?" says Platt. "And then one mistake – a stupid mistake, but just one – and I never got another chance." As a first-time offender, she served two months under house arrest in a plea bargain, but over a year later, she's held only a few short stints as a warehouse stocker and a hostess at chain restaurant Shoney's.

Platt attempted to compensate by throwing herself into a renovation effort on her small one-story home. "It just drove me crazy," she says. "All my life I've been working 10, then 15, then 20 hours a day – 22 with overtime, at the end. And then suddenly I could watch the clock tick by every single minute. That's just not how I was raised."

Today, Platt's house is impeccably clean, with an elaborately manicured herb garden. But to one side, boards and a cement mixer stand next to a tarpaulin-covered wall. "I didn't have enough money to finish it," she says, wistfully. "Everybody says time is money, but I've got all the time in the world and just nothing to do with it."

Google's employee perks include access to 'therapeutic' padded cots

And that's the paradox: with unemployment hovering over 10 percent for Americans without a college degree, the job market is brutally competitive. And without work, there may be little but sleep to pass the long hours of boredom and lost productivity.

Conservatives, and some liberals, have suggested that generations of poor economic prospects have fostered a culture of time-wasting and even time-theft among the communities most likely to oversleep. "When a kid's father is off dealing sleeping pills and his mother's dead to the world three hours a day, they grow up thinking that's acceptable. Or even that it's cool. A lot of today's media really glorifies it," says McCrory. Provocateur Donald Trump was more direct. "It's oiled-up girls in f---ng pajamas, rolling around like they're dreaming," he said in a controversial Fox News segment. "It goes all the way to the top. Even Obama – Obama admits himself that he's lazy, and what does that mean? It means he's sleeping on the job." Trump later issued a partial apology. "I shouldn't have made it personal," he said. "If I could take back the words, I would. But I'm not gonna take back the sentiment. Poor people like to sleep. And there's a racial component to it. That's just a f---ng fact."