This is a difficult piece to encapsulate. For one thing it runs several pages but even more it contains a great deal of information on the sad place much of Vermont has become, like just about anywhere Liberalism dominates.

"Vermont seems, in the abstract, all wrong for this sort of thing. Isn’t heroin the drug of the urban underclass, project housing, and street gangs? Vermont is among the whitest states in the union, and not so many years ago it had more cows than people, more miles of dirt roads than paved. It is, in the general imagination, the home of Ben & Jerry’s and a place where people don’t cook cough syrup for meth, they boil maple sap for syrup. In Vermont, when you talk of “doing drugs,” you mean smoking marijuana, which is so well tolerated that it might as well be legal."

This "sort of thing" is "...heroin. It’s everywhere."

"On his way into town, Dana Gray wondered about the number of cars and pickups parked at a local health care clinic. It was Saturday morning, and normally the clinic would be closed.

A little further down the road, he drove by the St. Johnsbury farmers’ market where the local organic gardeners and farmers set up Saturday mornings and do a nice weekend trade in vegetables, eggs, and cheese. There were a few vehicles parked nearby. Fewer, though, than there had been back up the road, at the clinic.

At the office of the Caledonian-Record, St. Johnsbury’s daily, where he is executive editor, Gray asked someone, “Hey, what’s going on at the clinic this morning?”

“It’s Saturday, remember?” a colleague said. “Free needle exchange day.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”"

Vermont is awash in drugs, especially heroin. "Right down to the towns of fewer than 10,000 souls, like St. Johnsbury, tucked up in the far corner of the state called the Northeast Kingdom, where the needle exchange is busier than the farmers’ market. Where dealers, many of them on some form of probation or parole from a previous conviction, do business in the center of town, outside the Depot Square, once a gracious old hotel and now a warren of apartments that rent cheaply enough that what the state’s housing subsidy doesn’t cover, the money off the sale of a few bags of smack will."

The causes for this social meltdown are multifarious. Vermont has earned itself a deserved image of a very tolerant lifestyle state. Tolerance is a good thing, of course, but it has attracted to Vermont a class of individuals who at best can be called "slackers". Then, too, Vermont's tolerance means little or no punishment for behavior which constitutes "victimless crimes", at least according to Vermonters. Even if you get caught doing or selling drugs there's little consequence. "Typically, drug arrests lead to a quick appearance before a judge and the formal filing of charges before the person who has been arrested is set free, pending trial. “Catch and release,” frustrated citizens call it. And the frustration is not only in St. Johnsbury but all over the state, as the heroin epidemic spreads and the authorities, state and local, struggle to get their hands around what the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has certified as the country’s highest rate of illicit drug use."

Lastly, and just as importantly, the Vermont economy is a wreck and welfare is a ubiquitous way of life. Welfare is demeaning and reduces its recipients to a childlike state. One program, for example, is "...dealing with grown women who have to be told, like children, “Clothes, towels, shoes, etc. are to be hung up, or put away.” And some of these women have children themselves. Who would not be frustrated at having to administer random urinalysis to these women to make sure they have not gone back to the needle, which got them into jail before they were given a chance to come here, and which will get them sent back if the UA comes up dirty?"

Vermont, a beautiful state which once was viewed as the "tough, self-reliant Vermont of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys or with native son Calvin Coolidge, who called Vermonters “a race of pioneers who almost impoverished themselves for a love of others.” is becoming Detroit writ large.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/d...688.html?page=1

Zitat

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Tolerance is a good thing, of course

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Not really. Tolerance is the giving up on maintaining social standards and morals that help keep a society healthy.

Not really. Tolerance is the giving up on maintaining social standards and morals that help keep a society healthy.

Don't make something out of it which it isn't. Have you never been married?

Quote: Cincinnatus wrote in post #4

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Don't make something out of it which it isn't. Have you never been married?

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