About five years ago, on a westbound bus rolling across the high and empty plains in the middle of the country, a young woman got so disturbingly wasted that the driver put her off in the little city of Laramie, Wyoming.

The local police locked her in a cell, at which point she began to pull from her vagina several tiny packages that, between them, contained approximately two grams of heroin.

"We were shocked," says Josh Merseal, a young prosecutor in Albany County, where Laramie is located. "We were like, heroin? We’d never seen it before."

Nor would the authorities in Laramie see heroin for several years after that. The girl from the bus was a passing transient, yes, and in some sense an anomaly, but she was also a kind of omen. By the time Merseal told me about her last August, there were so many busts, he was having trouble keeping track: Since 2013, he told me, Albany County had prosecuted ten…no, wait, eleven…heroin cases involving fifty, or fifty_ish,_ let’s say, defendants. The Laramie police chief, meanwhile, says heroin is "the most prominent hard drug out there" in his small city of 31,814. A federal prosecutor in Cheyenne, fifty miles east, declares flatly: "It’s in every part of the state."

Heroin is a dreary national trend, resurgent everywhere—in big cities, of course, but also in small towns and the middle of nowhere and even southern Wyoming. It doesn’t simply appear, though, like fairy dust. Someone has to bring it to those small cities and far-flung places. Someone has to supply the demand. Merseal remembers that guy, too.

"Before Ory," he says, "our major drug cases were mostly meth and weed busts, getting people to buy nickel bags. After Ory? It’s everything."

Ory would be Ory Joe Johnson, about whom, in fairness, a few things must be said at the outset. Ory did not introduce heroin or any other drug to Laramie, let alone to the state of Wyoming. He has never loitered on playgrounds or in alleys, tempting children and the naive. He is not associated, directly at least, with a murderous cartel, nor is he a kingpin in any remotely plausible sense of the word.

Ory, rather, is an industrious and entrepreneurial man of 37 who was born and raised in Torrington, a smudge of a village near the Nebraska state line, where his father was the town veterinarian. He was a popular kid, amiable and bright, president of his class in grade school, student-body president his junior year in high school. He hunted and fished, and he wrestled and played baseball for his school, mastered the piano, and was so good with a trombone—marching band, jazz band—that a college back east offered him a scholarship. He turned it down because he didn’t want to be a musician. Ory thought, for a while, that he might want to be a dentist, like his best friend’s father.

One Saturday in the summer of 1996, when Ory was 19 years old, he spent the day drinking beer out at Springer Reservoir, a lake south of Torrington. He drove home drunk and fell asleep on a dirt road about a mile from home. His Suburban hit a bridge railing at highway speed, crushed the front end, broke Ory’s nose and jaw and collarbone, bruised a lung and his liver, shattered his right ankle. A judge gave him two years’ probation for misdemeanor DUI, and a doctor gave him Vicodin for everything else. When he ran out of pills, he always got some more, and it didn’t seem to matter how often he ran out.