FRANKLIN, N.H. —

ill May’s leg spasmed as he sank into a tattered chair and recounted the life that brought him here: to a living room with holes punched in the drywall, a woman writhing on the couch in a drug stupor, and empty Narcan bottles littered about.

It was cold outside on this November morning as May reminisced about bygone high school football games, the birth of his two daughters, the summer he coached tee ball, and, most recently, the day federal agents stormed this house with rifles drawn, one of dozens of supposed drug raids the Trump administration touted far and wide.

He had scrambled down the stairs so quickly that morning he forgot to slip on a shirt. Outside, he locked eyes with local police officers, familiar faces shrouded in tactical gear. They drove him to the police station, where, for all of the drama surrounding his arrest, he was only charged with failure to pay a two-year-old fine. May didn’t have the $1,000, but was released shortly after posing for a booking photo.

Within days, his shirtless mugshot had gone viral. Police in Franklin posted the image in an online gallery celebrating a raid by the US Drug and Enforcement Administration on the Sinaloa Cartel, a notorious Mexican drug gang.

The photo roundup on Facebook featured 27 supposed cartel members and evoked over 3,000 reactions. Peppered among the sea of insults, death threats against the accused, and praise for the DEA was this one observation: “This is the kind of activity that, when left unchecked, can destroy a city completely.’’

No one in Franklin could argue with that. The fentanyl crisis has seeped into every corner of this old mill town, but as a recent Globe Spotlight Team investigation revealed, Franklin is no cartel hub. The roundup seemed intended to build up the apparent reach of the Sinaloa Cartel just before the Trump administration unleashed airstrikes on alleged drug boats in international waters. Caught in the politics of the moment was Franklin, one of countless American cities where the supply chain does not begin, but ends, in the veins of people like May.

“Generally speaking, everyone has their negatives,’’ May said. “I have several. Being part of a cartel is not one of them.’’

A riverside enclave south of the White Mountains, Franklin is far from the front lines of Trump’s global drug war. Yet it is home to the public health emergency that the federal offensive claims to address. Incorporated in 1895, Franklin once boomed with jobs generated by a hosiery mill, but today it still struggles to find its next act. The downtown strip is marked by boarded-up shops and its sidewalks feature a growing cast of characters, who are arrested one day and then seen shooting up the next.

At its center is Bill May, who says he has had few sober days since 1999, when a doctor prescribed two months of Vicodin for an ingrown toenail. And on that recent day in August, he was recast from casualty to culprit in this latest iteration of the war on drugs.

Ten years ago, not far from May’s home, then-presidential hopeful Chris Christie used Franklin as the backdrop for a campaign event focused on combatting the addiction crisis. “The president of the United States needs to be talking about this,’’ Christie said while sitting next to Franklin’s mayor.

“Franklin is only 8,500 people, neighboring towns are even smaller,’’ then-Mayor Ken Merrifield responded. “It’s incredible to see the number of people we are losing. We have a heroin overdose a week.’’

Today, the outlook for Franklin — and May — remains just as stark. It ranks in the top 20 for drug incidents — overdoses, Narcan administrations, treatment admissions — in the state, and reported dozens of non-fatal drug overdose and abuse incidents in 2024 alone, according to state Emergency Medical Services data.

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A decade ago, a real estate agent promised Bill May and his wife a good deal on a vinyl-sided, two-story house on Bow Street, a crescent-shaped road that runs along the Winnipesaukee River. The Mays, eager to put down roots and make a home for their two daughters, sold themselves on it.

They were vaguely aware of the street’s reputation; two months earlier, a couple two houses down had been arrested for drug possession and endangering children. But the Mays’ hope veiled the warnings.

“My wife was telling everybody, ‘Oh, we’re going to bring Bow Street back!,’’’ May recalled.

For a while, it felt like they had a fighting chance. May set out to renovate the sagging place, painting the walls blue throughout to calm his youngest’s OCD-related anxiety — a tip he learned while chatting with other parents at the doctor’s office.

He busted out walls to create an open-floor plan. The living room became a Mario Kart stadium, where the family of four battled it out in Saturday night video game races. May’s daughters perfected cookie and cake recipes in the kitchen, only to peek outside and see their father offering bites to the resident squirrels.

“It was an artsy home, filled with joy,’’ said Bill’s youngest daughter, Emma, now a freshman in college. “There was care put into it.’’

Back then, Emma spent Saturdays helping her father restore vintage Jaguars. She would climb into the driver’s seat, pumping and holding the brake pedal while May fiddled with valves, letting the fluid flow until it ran clear. The two were inseparable.

“He was my safety person, and I couldn’t really leave his side,’’ she recalled.

It wasn’t obvious then, but May was well into his descent into addiction.

He attributes it to five spinal surgeries throughout the 2000s and 2010s: the first, a botched discectomy, which landed him on the operating table months later for bony fusion surgery, a last resort operation that melds vertebrae together. These operations coincided with the height of the opioid-dispensing era, when the nation was saturated with painkiller scripts.

In 2012 alone, American health care providers wrote 259 million opioid prescriptions — enough for every American adult to have their own bottle.

May had many.

“I had never heard of Oxycontin before these surgeries,’’ he said.

On Bow Street, bottles of the painkiller were a fixture on his nightstand. May relied on a cocktail of Oxycontin, oxycodone, fentanyl patches, and Tramadol to get through the day. All of it prescribed by his doctors.

“I used to think I had life by the tail,’’ May said. “And then I really became a heinous drug addict.’’

His unraveling happened slowly in late 2017 — and then all at once. A messy divorce, the loss of insurance, health care’s opioid reckoning. They all compounded to create a nightmarish slide May couldn’t — or wouldn’t — stave off. The orange bottles on the nightstand ran dry and were replaced with whatever those who wandered Bow Street had to offer.

“It was awful, seeing him turn like that,’’ his daughter said.

May’s marquee belly laugh became rarer and rarer. Fentanyl killed it altogether.

“It was a Santa-type laugh. The kind everybody would talk about. It defined him,’’ said Emma. “If you heard that laugh, you knew he was sober.’’

May racked up a string of arrests: drug possession, shoplifting, criminal trespassing, bail jumping, and a DUI — the source of the outstanding $1,000 fine that landed him in the DEA’s crosshairs.

Everything became currency: auto mechanic’s tools and the Jaguars that were brought to life by them; the guitar May had strummed since he was 16; a box of mementos from his father, who had died when May was 6. With each sale, sanctity sapped from the home.

Emma returned from school one day to find her closet ransacked and strangers — addicts — roaming the sidewalks in her clothes.

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Victory in the war against drugs has largely eluded America since 1971, when President Nixon declared it public enemy number one.

From 1999 to 2020, nearly a million Americans died from drug overdoses. Today, overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 44, according to the CDC. Over 50 million Americans struggle with addiction, yet only 1 in 5 receive treatment.

In his first term, Trump recognized the opioid crisis as “a public health emergency.’’ In the second term, his administration has leaned on law enforcement to combat drug abuse. Recently, military airstrikes have decimated alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China aim to impede the flow of fentanyl.

Experts told the Globe that busts targeting low-level users such as Bill May are widely ineffective at bringing down criminal organizations.

“It’s a never-ending story,’’ said Edgardo Buscaglia, a senior research scholar at Columbia Law School and expert on international organized crime. “The trafficking will continue. The names will change.’’

Incarceration and arrests do not generally deter drug use and distribution, data show. Attacking the demand through robust and well-funded social programs and treatment programs, as some governments in Europe have done, would present a bigger threat to the cartels’ business, Buscaglia said.

In Franklin, the drug dilemma unfolds at a treatment center called Archways, which is at the end of Bow Street. After the government formally recognized the opioid crisis, an influx of federal and state funds trickled down to Archways, said Mark Watman, the center’s vice president.

“But with success came less funding, even as fentanyl became more accessible and had disastrous effects on individuals,’’ Watman said. “There’s not adequate funding and support for people who need treatment.’’

The Trump administration recently dismantled large portions of the federal agency focused on addiction treatment, reducing its staff by more than half and alarming local governments, nonprofits, and behavioral health providers that rely on the office for funding and expertise.

In April, the administration clawed back $80 million in unspent post-pandemic relief funding from New Hampshire. Among the initiatives that lost money was the Health Disparities Grant, which funded employees at Archways, as well as a $1.4 million grant specifically intended to combat the state’s fentanyl crisis.

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On a recent morning, just weeks before his 50th birthday, Bill May chain-smoked menthols and fiddled with a spent lighter. He scanned the room and took stock of the filth — from cigarettes, drugs, and a stove fueled by whatever will burn — smudging the once vibrant blue walls.

“It’s hard to know [who I am] anymore,’’ he said. “I’m kind of a smart dude. I have a really good sense of humor. And I guess I’m a junkie trying to survive in this world. But you know what? I just recently quit.’’

As he spoke, the floors of the upstairs bedrooms — which once belonged to May’s daughters — creaked from strangers who had come in for a night and never left. May acknowledges he’s never been good at saying no.

In that moment, though, he was trying. Fresh from a seven-day detox program, he was fueled only by weed, cigarettes, Gatorade, and buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid use disorder.

He buzzed around the backyard, picking up trash and speaking to the squirrels. He chopped firewood, which occasionally inflamed his bad back, and hauled the bundles up the porch stairs, past a pillaged red toolbox with his daughter’s volleyball roster shot still glued to the lid.

“I’ve got to get out of Franklin,’’ he declared.

His current plan involves sobriety — keeping the monkey off his back, as he calls it — and selling the home on Bow Street, which has already been seized by the city.

He also wants to see his daughters, whom he speaks of in alternating past and present tenses, as if they belonged to a past life.

He last saw Emma this summer, one month before the raid. He tried to explain his struggle to stay sober and fight back from the fringes.

“He can’t figure out how to incorporate himself back into society,’’ Emma recalled.

That day, they drove up a hill to a spot that towers over Franklin, with Bow Street below. They listened to May’s favorite song on the car stereo.

The upbeat track — “Dashboard’’ by Modest Mouse — is often interpreted in one of two ways: as a lesson in staying positive and always looking for the silver lining, or as a cautionary tale of deluding oneself to the point of mental breakdown.

May belted the bridge: “It would’ve been, could’ve been worse than you would ever know. Oh, the dashboard melted, but we still have the radio.’’

It’s a song he requests whenever he gets the chance. His Bow Street home hasn’t had a radio — or electricity for that matter — for years.

Andrew Ryan and Joey Flechas of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Hanna Krueger can be reached at hanna.krueger@globe.com or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at hsk.13.