Heroin gains a deadly foothold in Vermont
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ST. ALBANS, Vt. Every day, Samantha Emerson fights the craving that led her here, to a seat on the porch of a tattered home, under a leaking roof beside a trash-strewn yard.
The 26-year-old single mother of two has no job, cannot afford to fix her car, and faces eviction from a household where chaos is commonplace and opiates, which Emerson has worked hard to beat, remain a temptation.
The view from her kitchen window suggests another life entirely, a postcard world she is in but barely part of. A few miles east of St. Albans in far northern Vermont, snow-topped mountains rise majestically from the thick forest. It is a jarring contrast the serenity, the desperation that has come to characterize a corner of New England many Americans associate with covered bridges and dairy farms.
Here in Franklin County, hard by the Canadian border, cheap heroin and stolen prescription drugs have ravaged many of Emersons generation and the teenagers coming up behind them. Although Emerson says she is sober now, the battle against addiction still boils inside her and in the state she calls home. Vermont, according to its governor, Peter Shumlin, is confronting a full-blown heroin crisis.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/01/19/amid-pastoral-splendor-heroin-gains-deadly-foothold-vermont/wNgLvM7CBhltWJIhoWNUzM/story.html