American Consequences - June 2018

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t was the kind of story that, five years ago, would have made you sit up and take notice. “Good Lord,” you might have thought. “Unbelievable.” It was merely a small item in the Caledonian Record , the paper that serves what is known in Vermont as “the Northeast Kingdom.” This is where the state’s old ways, habits, and customs have dug in and are making a stand... of sorts. The “Kingdom” votes conservative, by Vermont standards, and the Caledonian ’s editorial page is an anomaly in the state. (Which perhaps explains why it publishes me once a week.)

By Geoff Norman

The Kingdom is poor. The sort of place where the fondest hope of young people with any ambition to speak of is... to leave. These days, they have found another means of escape. Like the young woman who, as the Record reported, “... took her five-year-old daughter with her to purchase heroin last week, ‘cooked and injected’ it in front of the child and then overdosed behind the wheel while driving home.” Where I once might have read this and been shocked, my response in 2018 was more on the order of, “Oh, yeah. Another day, another overdose.” I suppose I’d first started hearing, reading, and writing about heroin in Vermont around five years ago. Someone told me a man whose garage I had done business with was dealing smack. It turned out to be true. And that man who had worked on my car was not alone. He was just one of many, I realized, as I read story after story about police busting

yet another dealer on the interstate, with out- of-state plates, bringing in a thousand bags or more that would retail at $30 each. I’d moved to Vermont to get out of New York, which was drowning in drugs at the time. I wanted to raise a family and preferred that my kids not grow up to be addicts. And it had worked out. My two daughters had been launched into the world from Vermont, and even when they were in their teens, I hadn’t worried much about drugs. If I had, I would have been thinking pot. There was plenty of that in Vermont, and you could only go so far in shutting out the world. But heroin ? The idea was so inconsistent with everything I knew – and loved – about my adopted state that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I did what people in my line of work do with an obsession. I got an assignment to write about it for a magazine where I’d been publishing some articles. Mostly about Civil War battles on the 100th anniversaries of those engagements. “From Cold Harbor to Cold Turkey,” I said to my wife when I set out for the Kingdom. My plan was to start there, drive south, and learn

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50 June 2018

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