NEW YORK

--During the two years Joe Sacco and I reported from the poorest pockets of the United States, areas that have been sacrificed before the altar of unfettered and unregulated capitalism, we found not only decayed and impoverished communities but shattered lives. There comes a moment when the pain and despair of constantly running into a huge wall, of realizing that there is no way out of poverty, crush human beings. Those who best managed to resist and bring some order to their lives almost always turned to religion and in that faith many found the power to resist and even rebel.

On the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where our book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" opens, and where the average male has a life expectancy of 48 years, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti, those who endured the long night of oppression found solace in traditional sweat lodge rituals, the Lakota language and cosmology, and the powerful four-day Sun Dance, where dancers fast and make small flesh offerings.

In Camden, N.J., it was the power and cohesiveness of the African-American church. In the coalfields of southern West Virginia, it was the fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant churches, and in the produce fields of Florida, it was the Catholic Mass.

Those who are not able to hang on, fall long and hard. They retreat into the haze of alcohol--Pine Ridge has an estimated alcoholism rate of 80 percent--or the harder drugs, easily available on the streets of Camden: from heroin to crack to weed to something called Wet, which is marijuana leaves soaked in PCP. In the produce fields, drinking was also a common release.

In West Virginia the drug of choice was OxyContin, or "hillbilly heroin." Joe and I went into some old coal camps, largely abandoned, and there it was as if we were interviewing zombies; the speech and movements of those we met were so bogged down by opiates that they were often hard to understand. This passage from our book is a look at some of those West Virginians, discarded by the wider society, who struggle to deal with the terrible pain of rejection and purposelessness that comes when there is a loss of meaning and dignity.

MINING THE MOTHER LODE