In 2016, several young men were arrested in Charleston, South Carolina, as part of a small-time drug-trafficking ring. Their choice of drug was Xanax, which Americans were overdosing on at a tenfold rate between 1999 and 2015 (more than double the opioid overdoses during the same time frame) and which college students flocked to as a way of alleviating anxiety and stress while keeping up grueling schedules—especially if they belonged to fraternities, where there’s no such thing as downtime.
The men in question either went to or knew people at the College of Charleston, a bucolic campus for budding power brokers, seemingly the last place one would expect a drug enterprise to flourish. But as Max Marshall details in his deeply reported debut, Among the Bros, “C of C,” and particularly its Greek life, was rife with criminal doings—including a murder that remained unsolved.
