more about what I had begun to think of as a heroin “epidemic.” I saw the assignment, in part, as a road trip. I thought about taking my fly rod but decided against it. That turned out to be the right call. It was not a fun trip. This was in the fall of 2013 and I quickly realized that I had, if anything, undersold the story to my editor. There is a prison just outside of St. Johnsbury, the Record’s hometown . And the paper’s editor explained that after the convicts are released, many just move into town. After all, behind bars they had learned everything they needed to know to become successful local dealers. In the middle of St. Johnsbury was an old, elegant hotel that had been converted into apartments for people dependent on “public housing.” Many of them were, of course, addicts. They crowded the street in the afternoon (they were not early risers) and they panhandled and hassled and generally made the public space into an area the public avoided. St. Johnsbury, which had once been a lovely and prosperous little city, was dying – and the dealers and junkies and convicts might have been the maggots on its corpse. Before I left town, one of the paper’s editors told me he had been driving to the office on a Saturday morning and noticed a large crowd at the free clinic. Larger than the one a little further down the road at the farmers market. “Well, yeah,” someone said. It was needle- exchange day at the clinic. In Vermont, it seemed, if the race were between the junkies and the organic farmers, then the junkies were winning.
I went on with my travels, covering much of the state. But the mother lode of my research was in Rutland, where the mayor acknowledged to me that his city had become the face of Vermont’s heroin problem. “Ground zero,” he and his chief of police called it. He was neither happy about it nor willing to sit still. He and the chief said they would cooperate with me in any way they could. They wanted it known that they understood they had a problem and were working to fix it. I spent several days in Rutland coming to admire the people who were trying to get their hands around the drug problem, and I felt the sort of compassion you extend to anyone who is giving it all in a lost cause. One of those people was a cop named Matt Prouty. When I met Prouty, he was booking a couple of women he had just arrested for dealing. As he tagged some syringes as evidence, he told me that one of the women was a nurse at an old-age home. Prouty explained how his boss, Chief Jim Baker, was a believer in saturation policing: You go where the crime is. The police knew where the junkies and the dealers lived, dealt drugs, and shot up, so that’s where they went. They wanted to make life as hard for the druggies as the druggies were making it for everyone else. In Vermont, it seemed, if the race were between the junkies and the organic farmers, then the junkies were winning.
American Consequences 51
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