WEST BRATTLEBORO-Free the drugs.
I suggest the state of Vermont offers free drugs administered by trained medics from mobile vans. People with addictions can be invited, educated, and administered free drugs. If these patients show interest, then alternative medications and other modalities to control and end addiction can be offered.
Extreme? What is extreme is abandoning people with addictions to be preyed upon by drug dealers and gangs.
Falling into the trap of buying illegal drugs leads to home invasions, sex trafficking, robbery, and homelessness. It also leads to death: exposure to the winter cold, faked suicides by hot shots (overdose) and other means, and outright executions.
The responsibilities of daily living, of earning a living, caring for children, and affording a home are shifted onto family members, the neighborhood, the town, state, and nation, and the physical traumas of addiction are worsened by shame, pain, stress, and despair.
My belief is that, with drugs offered for free, people with addictions will avoid making ties, or will be able to break their ties, with illegal drug traffickers. Homeless people with addictions will not be using drugs in public spaces. Apartment dwellings will not have dealers and users loitering in stairwells and entries. Needles can be accounted for and not left on the sidewalk.
At the very least, by advocating for free drugs, I hope to shift the attention from the people with addictions to the much more serious dangers posed by the drug gangs that prey upon them.
The gangs arrived in Brattleboro on the heels of the opioid crisis that was caused by legal "Big Pharma" dealers, and the gangs remain in the shadows behind the more obvious public displays of desperate addicts. (Yes, there were gangs before the opiate crisis, but they kept their business mostly out of our town life.)
Let's look clearly at the source of this collective trauma and come up with some effective, perhaps extreme, measures to halt the degradation of our town and townspeople.
And folks, smoke local. Use homegrown marijuana and also grow it for others, since it's now legal. Contaminated weed and THC products are yet more tools of the illegal drug trade.
Nancy Crompton
West Brattleboro
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