The hidden heroin epidemic gripping America

Vermont is achingly pretty, the archetypal picture postcard American state. But there’s melancholy too.

Even as the leaves change colour, and the light of summer seeps away, you’re left with the cold reality of difficult lives in a state which prides itself on quality of life.

Maybe it was just talking about painkillers and heroin that made the place seem melancholic: conversations with two articulate grandmothers who share the care of their 18-month-old grandson because their son and daughter are both addicts.

One of the women has already raised two grandchildren by another addict daughter.

And a chat with a house painter, working on a dilapidated building, about his daughter – an injecting drug user – who’d lost sight in one eye because of her addiction.

And the guy on the stoop who’d watched his street transformed, house by house, as the trade came to town.

Everyone may be affected, to some extent, but naturally not everyone agrees on the solution.

There is a brave effort by the Vermont state government to take an innovative approach that doesn’t emphasise locking addicts up, but instead tries to get them into treatment.

But in these streets, where neighbours watch strangers with backpacks come and go to the same address where taxis make multiple calls, and wraith-like addicts hover, it’s hard not simply to want the problem stowed away, out of sight.

One young mother on the streets of Brattleboro made it clear she wanted addicts in jail, well away from her children, and the crime connected to their addiction treated as exactly that, without any options for treatment rather than incarceration.

It’s too early to call whether Vermont’s policies are working. And the odds are stacked.

The bag of heroin that costs roughly $20 in Vermont costs just $5 or $6 in Brooklyn, Newark or Boston. There’s an economic imperative to keep the drugs moving up the interstate highways to the rural north. ​

Away from the policy discussions, it is the impact on families and young people that gets you in the pit of your stomach.

The girl who you know was bright and engaging, who is slumped and lethargic, and struggling to get through just one more day without a hit.

The mum who goes to the support groups, and appreciates how sick her daughter is, but just can’t make her better and feels terrible because of that.

Everything’s inside out: mothers planning funerals for their daughters, doctors prescribing pills to take away your pain which ultimately deliver you into a lifetime of suffering.

The governor rails against a system – enabled by the Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical companies and doctors – that he says handed out painkillers with irrational exuberance, ensnaring his citizens into opiate addiction. And when those pills became too expensive, leading them onto the cheaper, and readily available heroin.

There’s supply, and there’s demand. Reducing either will take an enormous act of will.

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