Governor [Peter] Shumlin hauled out his own list of grim statistics. In Vermont, treatment for opiate abuse has risen 770 percent since 2000. In just the past year, treatment for heroin addiction has risen a dramatic 40 percent, and deaths from heroin overdoses have doubled. Nearly 80 percent of those jailed in Vermont, he said, are now or have been drug addicts.
Perhaps even more sobering were the stories he told of lives ruined by drug addiction. One Vermont teen started using Oxycontin in the 10th grade and was soon addicted to a $500-a-day habit. He stole $20,000 in farm equipment from his own family to pay for his drugs. And not long ago another young man, an undergraduate at the University of Vermont who was a science major and member of the school’s ski team, died of a heroin overdose. Because the quality and potency of each batch of black-market heroin varies widely, even those who think they are cautious users can accidentally and suddenly overdose at any time.
Both stories sought to shatter perceptions that heroin addiction is a problem only for large urban areas. In fact, Vermont represents a particularly lucrative market for heroin dealers, the governor said, who find that they can sell a bag of heroin that would fetch $6 on the streets of New York City for $30 or more there. Each Vermont addict yields five times the income from the same amount of “product.”
Read it all and you call find the full text of Governor Peter Shumlin’s 2014 State of the State Address there.
I suppose it could be worsening in some places, but I’ve seen it big in both rural and suburban communities for at least a decade. Meth isn’t going away, either.
Vermont has been transformed over the past 40 years by a massive immigration of people (massive for a state with a population of only approx 640,000) from the urban centers on the northeastern seaboard.
Prior to this immigration, Vermont was a quiet rural state of hardworking people who were not given to the fadish and untested political/societal innovations that emerged in the nation’s urban population centers during the 1960s and 1970s.
That all changed.
Along with the influx of different-thinking people and different-behavior life-styles, “carpet bagging politicians” arrived in Vermont from the large city areas.
And these politicians were good and still are good at organizing a politically disorganized population and winning elections.
They play and have played sly games with the media and with the various subsets of Vermonters in order to win elections.
If you read a typical Vermont newspaper or look at TV from stations originating in Vermont you you ingest material that looks like it olriginated as talking points from the Democratic Party’s National Committee.
And this is in a state that was once a Republican/Conservative Libertarian stronghold before the invasion from the urban centers forty years ago.