[B]RATTLEBORO — Local Police Chief Michael Fitzgerald stood by listening as Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Thomas Anderson read the proverbial riot act to drug dealers he said have pushed this southeastern town’s opioid overdose numbers to the highest in the state.
“The excuse that ‘I am simply dealing this drug to support my own habit because I can’t get into treatment or have to wait to get into treatment and I simply need to sell this drug so I don’t get sick …’ is not valid,” Anderson said at a press conference on the subject. “We are coming after you. We are going to be uncompromising in making arrests and stopping people from distributing this poison.”
Later, Fitzgerald sat at a Compassionate Community program on the same issue as social worker and town Selectboard Chair Brandie Starr offered a rebuttal.
“Contrary to the sound bites that we all ingested from the commissioner, there is not on-demand service for opiate addiction — you cannot just walk into a place when you feel like you need to recover,” Starr told the audience. “The way that we handle this is abominable. We toss them in for a mere three weeks and then we expect their behavior to be perfect while they come back out and sleep in a pricker bush?”
Between the two poles, Fitzgerald is trying to walk a tightrope. The police chief’s town isn’t the only one in Vermont struggling with addiction and aggravators such as poverty and mental illness. But the community, the first exit off Interstate 91 and the nearest to the New England drug-route hubs of Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut, has seen opiate use skyrocket from 20 reported overdoses in 2010 to upward of 100, including five resulting in death, this past year.
Add the surrounding bedroom towns of Windham County and you’ll find an area with less than 7% of the state’s population reporting nearly a quarter of its opioid problem.
A federal and state crackdown touted by authorities at a tough-talking press conference this spring hasn’t stopped local drug dealing, even at 33 Oak St., a headline-grabbing apartment building tucked in a tree-lined neighborhood between a special needs school and a residence for single mothers and children. A dawn raid this winter supposedly shut down sales there, yet police say at least one current dweller seen engaging in suspicious activity this summer has a history of selling heroin.
Calls for compassion for people struggling with addiction haven’t calmed the situation either. Brattleboro has eclipsed Burlington as the state’s most liberal population center, having voted for Democratic and Progressive candidates in the highest percentage per capita in 2018. But a push by some residents against stigmatizing or shaming people is discouraging others from joining the conversation for fear they’ll be stigmatized or shamed themselves.
“The division here can be huge — from ‘we should legalize drugs’ to ‘if you catch someone they need to go to jail,’” Fitzgerald says. “Unfortunately, many people believe if they make a statement they’re going to be branded one way or the other, so they aren’t saying anything at all.”
‘Cost of public self-expression may just be too high’
Consider what happened to Shanta Lee Gander, the town’s first Selectboard member of color turned writer for the weekly Commons newspaper. She recently attended a public forum to ask local leaders how they determined whether people seeking money on downtown streets were there because of addiction issues or simply because they were homeless.
“We know that sometimes those things all get lumped together,” said Gander, aiming to discover how residents could best assist each group.
The response was fast and firm.
“There is no difference — they’re people,” said Chad Simmons, project coordinator for the Windham County Consortium on Substance Use. “Once we start saying ‘these people over here’ and ‘these people over here,’ what are we doing? We’re hearing from folks, ‘People are people and we just want to belong.’ The conversation should just end there.”
While some in the audience applauded Simmons’ attempt not to pigeonhole anyone, others view such statements as attempts to silence a more complex discussion.
Outside the forum held at the town fire station, a nearby resident told how his truck was stolen by a drug user. After police recovered the vehicle, he had to pay $330 to retrieve it from a tow company and rid it of syringes. The man doesn’t feel community calls for compassion extend to him.
“I’m living on disability and a fixed income,” he said. “When my truck was stolen, not one person offered to help me. I was walking around in 90-degree weather trying to get to the doctor’s. What about people like me? Who’s helping me? And I’m the one who’s being talked to disdainfully?”
The man’s neighbor attended a Selectboard meeting to say he, his wife and the two grandchildren they’re raising had to move because of drug dealing.
“Doors knocking from 1 o’clock to 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock in the morning, people trying to get in saying, ‘I want my drugs,’” he said tearfully. “My wife would be scared and say to me, ‘What are we going to do?’ A cognac bottle coming through the window in our bedroom … that was the last straw. We didn’t want to leave, we were forced to leave.”
But such public statements are increasingly rare in a town witnessing more and more pushback. Employees of some 20 downtown businesses discovered that recently after submitting a letter to the editor to the Commons about a rising number of people soliciting on sidewalks.
“Addiction is here in Brattleboro, and those of us working downtown are bearing witness to the negative reverberations of our community’s generosity to those asking for money on our streets,” it read in part. “We are enabling behavior that none of us wants: continued drug use, alcohol abuse, and emotionally out-of-control exchanges … This behavior is having a direct negative impact on the economic sustainability of our downtown business district, the jobs within our downtown district, our local area property values, and our quality of life.”
The letter writers asked not to be named so they wouldn’t be targeted — only to find themselves in a bullseye at the next Selectboard meeting.
“So many folks are out there helping in positive ways, and I think it’s a much better thing to do than to focus on some of the effects, and we’ve seen this recently in social media postings and anonymous letters to the editor, which I find less than helpful,” Vice Chair Tim Wessel said.
One of the business owners identified herself in a follow-up.
“What surprises me about the response to our letter is that the means of expressing our concerns seems to be more important to this community than the message we tried to convey,” Ruggles & Hunt shopkeeper Vicki Gohl wrote. “Perhaps the readership of this paper thinks the non-signers of the letter cowardly, but when your business and livelihood are at stake — your home mortgage, your payroll, your business rent — the cost of public self-expression may just be too high.”
‘We have to find that middle ground’
As the town disagrees over what’s appropriate to discuss, its drug problem is expanding. Walking into downtown’s Plaza Park between the local Food Co-op and Brattleboro Museum and Art Center earlier this month, one could talk to people using marijuana, crack cocaine and opioids on public benches. That, in turn, has sparked questions about policing.
“We should be really frank,” Town Manager Peter Elwell said at the most recent Selectboard meeting, “that arresting someone for misdemeanor conduct in the context that we’re talking about is going to spend a lot of time doing bookings and running people into the system that is not going to cure anything for that person or for our community.”
Neighbors of 33 Oak St. report their own challenges. Drug dealing and related crime made news at the address this past winter because of not only the adjacent school and home for single mothers but also two nearby apartment buildings owned by former Gov. Peter Shumlin, who focused on opioids five years ago in his State of the State address.
Police raided 33 Oak St. in February in the first of a series of Brattleboro drug busts that federal and state authorities touted in an April press conference. But three months later, neighbors say new dealers are working out of the house.
To prove it, they invited local police to a meeting this month. Just before one officer’s arrival, they watched a resident of 33 Oak St. walk out with a cellphone, wait for a vehicle to pull up, get in and get out, and return inside — a practice they’ve photographed and reported to authorities for months.
The officer who arrived and saw the man confirmed he has a history of selling heroin, although his activity doesn’t match the 50 customers a day 33 Oak St. saw at its height before authorities swarmed the building and placed five occupants into federal custody.
Authorities won’t discuss specifics about their work against such dealing. The community, for its part, is struggling with how to simply talk with rather than at each other.
Local Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, confirmed the challenge at the recent Governor’s Institute on Current Issues and Youth Activism at nearby Putney’s Landmark College. When her colleagues were asked about pressing issues, they pointed to the economy, education and the environment. Kornheiser, for her part, added another item: “How can you move from righteousness to have a real conversation?”
Kornheiser has witnessed the drug crisis from multiple perspectives as a legislator, director of workforce development for Youth Services Inc., and someone who used to live on a street where dealing took place.
“So many of us think that for one person to get their needs met another person can’t,” she says. “But it’s going to be really hard to find solutions that work for everyone if we don’t have everyone in the conversation.”
Some are figuring out ways to communicate. At the fire station forum, Ann Wright aimed to bridge the gap by introducing herself as a resident who has seen addiction both in her personal circle and as a manager at the downtown Food Co-op.
“There is a distinction to me between being compassionate and being tolerant of uncivil behavior which is happening right outside of our door,” Wright said. “We’ve had acts of indecent exposure and sexual activity at 3 o’clock on a Saturday. There is a point where compassion for those of us who are on the front lines day after day after day becomes exhausted. I really would like us as a community to recognize and address the uncivil behavior that is happening publicly and that’s really affecting a lot of us.”
Several groups are working on the issue, starting with a partnership of police and area health and human service providers called Project CARE — Community Approach to Recovery and Engagement — that’s connecting people with local treatment options. The Commons, for its part, will host a “Solutions: Where Do We Go from Here?” community conversation July 31 at 6 p.m. at 118 Elliot St.
“You have a lot of moving parts here — unemployment, homeless, mental health …” Fitzgerald says. “It’s certainly all hands on deck. We’re whittling away at it, but we can’t do it alone.”
That’s because, for all the debate, local drug statistics have yet to drop.
“We have to find that middle ground — and a lot of patience,” the local police chief says. “I hear people when they say the community is enabling, but where we’re finding success is getting a lot more people at least talking to recovery experts, where before there was no conversation. This didn’t manifest itself overnight, and it’s not going to fix itself overnight.”
