Vermont Heroin Epidemic
When I tell an Exonian I’m from Vermont I receive one of three responses: “Where is that?” or “ Oh, I have a house there!” or “Skiing something-something Ben and Jerry’s.”
I am fine with this image of my state. Of course, we have more notable achievements; we were the first to legalize gay marriage, the first state to abolish slavery and we have Bernie Sanders. However, most people are unaware that underneath the magazine snapshots and the homegrown kale, an affliction is crippling our lower class. In the past decade, a heroin epidemic has emerged. Since the year 2000, the number of Vermonters treated for heroin addiction has risen by 800 percent. Vermont has become a major drug trafficking route between Canada and New York, and now, due to the overprescription of opiates, demand for heroin in Vermont has skyrocketed, allowing drug dealers to sell narcotics for sometimes five hundred percent over city rates. This expensive drug has made heroin more readily available to anybody who goes searching for it.
Many Vermont heroin users begin their addictions through legally prescribed opiates. With insurance, the drugs are nearly free. But when the prescription ends and the addiction doesn’t, a person hooked on narcotics seeks out other suppliers. The standard street value for oxycodone, an opiate and the active ingredient in Percocet and Oxycontin, is one dollar per milligram. A single pill can range from 30 milligrams to 80 milligrams, and an addict can easily consume upwards of 200 milligrams a day. That’s 6,000 dollars a month, which is comparable to the cost of renting a two-bedroom brownstone in Brooklyn. Needless to say, this is an unsustainable habit; if the addict had money to pay for the drugs initially they won’t in a couple of months. A gram of heroin costs only 20 dollars. No one wants to do heroin. But when you're broke, and you’ve run out of Percocet, it's not a matter of what your rational mind wants, it’s a matter of what your psychological and physical dependency needs.
My best friend from preschool through eighth grade was a kid named Elliot.* Elliot was a scrawny, pale kid with coarse brown hair and glasses with quarter-inch thick lenses. Elliot’s dad was a burly figure with a scruffy blonde beard and years of blacksmithing experience. One day when we were in eighth grade, Elliot’s dad picked him up for the weekend in a dirty silver truck, his right hand on the wheel and his left arm in a plaster cast. About a month later Elliot mentioned his dad had started crushing and snorting Percocet.
I took note but didn’t pry any further; at the time I was unfamiliar with the extent of the drug’s effects. Later that year Elliot and his new step-dad Tom got into an argument that ended with Elliot fleeing to a friend’s house. The next day all of his belongings were on his mom’s front lawn. Elliot went to live with his dad full time. Elliot revealed that they were growing a crop of six marijuana plants along a hunting trail behind his barn.
Through our freshman year, Elliot would bring ounces of weed packed in multiple ziplock freezer bags to school in his day bag to sell. I didn’t approve of his dealing, but one day he confessed his motivations to me. He feared that if he didn’t bring the money back to his dad, he wouldn’t be able to afford the Percocet and would switch to the cheaper alternative.
President Donald Trump has stated that he will stop our heroin problem by closing off the southern border. This is an uneducated and oversimplified position. With such a financial incentive for both pharmaceutical companies and drug dealers alike, opioid distributors will always find a way to circumvent the system. The most tangible solution is to review prescriptio n regulations on medical narcotics and put systems in place to help those affected deal with addiction.
*name changed to protect privacy