But things were visibly and undeniably better. Like so many other fights, it seems, in the war on drugs there are no conclusive victories. But that doesn’t mean you quit fighting. But in time, if you looked at the big picture, the state’s efforts did seem to be “working.” The number of overdoses began to fall until the state’s rate was the lowest in New England. Nineteen states were worse, in this regard, than Vermont. So, more people in treatment did seem to mean fewer in the morgue. In July 2017, a White House official with the ugly title “Drug Czar” came to Vermont to praise the state’s efforts in dealing with opioid addiction, calling the strategy “an incredibly valuable national model.” Easy for him to say. He works in Washington. I wondered how things looked to people in the trenches. People like Prouty and McKenzie. So I went back to Rutland to find out. Everyone had a story. A classmate of my younger daughter died of an overdose. My daughter was sad but hardly surprised. “He’s not the only one,” she said. But you continued hearing the awful stories. One in eight babies born at Rutland Regional Medical Center is addicted. Eleven people were treated for overdosing in a single day in one town. That day, incidentally, was Independence Day, with heroin as a new sort of fireworks display.
into a decline that looked irreversible because of people like the woman who had come outside to yell obscenities at him. After that meeting with McKenzie and her staff, I went home and wrote my story. The Standard published it. Even put it on the cover. That was November 2013. Two months later, Gov. Peter Shumlin devoted Vermont’s entire State of the State address to heroin. Shumlin spoke boldly of how we “could not arrest our way out of the problem,” and of finding “new solutions.” I’m certainly vain enough to claim some credit if I thought I could get away with it. But the truth is, Shumlin didn’t need to read an article in a conservative journal to learn that Vermont had a heroin problem. Like all of us who passed our days in the state ... he knew . Because by then, it was impossible not to know. Vermont, and its drug problem, became the subject of articles in publications ranging from the New York Times, to Rolling Stone, to Al Jazeera . Shumlin’s new approach – prevention and treatment over arrest and incarceration – was widely praised, including by the administration in Washington. There seemed to be a conviction that the state’s general sense of enlightenment – Shumlin had, after all, just proposed a single-payer health insurance program – would carry the fight against heroin and opioid addiction to success.
54 June 2018
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