LUCERNE, NH—Residents of a sleepy village in southern New Hampshire reported their dismay Monday after the recent ominous rise of a dark, sinister underbelly in their small suburban town turned out to just be heroin again. “Lately, there’s just been a real foreboding sense that all wasn’t right around here and that something terrible was going on below the surface, but it was just heroin like all the other times,” said Lucerne resident Earl Kempler, 53, explaining that his fellow denizens had believed that the recent spate of mysterious occurrences and odd behaviors could be part of a freaky cult or nefarious criminal plot before they discovered, to their disappointment, that a significant percentage of community members had simply started using heroin again. “It turns out the people sneaking around in the woods or going off to dark corners of the town in the middle of the night were just heroin users looking for a place to do heroin, and all the weird ways we’d heard folks speaking cryptically in hushed tones was only related to buying or using drugs. Personally, I was hoping that all the people disappearing and turning up dead days later in the creek or in abandoned houses at the edge of town were part of some crazy kidnapping ring or victims of a deranged murdering spree, but in reality they all just died from overdoses. They’re not even smuggling the heroin or anything—they’re just shooting up and dying.” Residents added that they were chagrined that of all the potential creeps and weirdos who could be causing problems, the only real sinister person in the town was the doctor who kept overprescribing people opioids and cutting them off after they’d become addicted.

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