by Art Woolf
Governor Shumlin says
What I can tell you is that we're losing good, decent Vermonters to an epidemic where these poisons and chemicals are sold in fancy packages in stores in Vermont by greedy people who don't care about the deaths, the tragedies that ensue, when this junk is consumed
I assume he's not talking about alcohol, although half of all traffic deaths in Vermont are caused by impaired drivers. And those greedy people can't be the state of Vermont itself, which benefits to the tune of millions of dollars from the sale of alcohol.
No, he's talking about bath salts, which were involved in a tragic accident and fatalities earlier this year. Demonizing one type of drug and trying to make it illegal has been shown to be unsuccessful for years. You can go back to Prohibition. Or to Richard Nixon's 1971 declaration of a war on drugs. So far drugs are winning despite the billions of dollars we've spent to try to defeat that enemy and the millions of people who are incarcerated as a result of that war.
