Gina Tron is a freelance writer in New York. Her first novel will be out in September. Follow her @_ginatron.

A few days before I started high school, in 1996, I attended a freshman orientation. I remember sitting at a table in the cafeteria, watching my new classmates file in. One girl caught my eye—she was tall and thin, with flowing strawberry blonde hair and a guy on each side.

Wow, I thought. She was the picture of what I thought a pretty, popular high school girl would be.


A few years later, she was dead. Overdosed on heroin.

Last month, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin devoted his entire annual address to the state’s heroin crisis. Two million dollars worth of heroin is pumped into Vermont each week, he said, and 80 percent of the state’s inmates are in prison for drug crimes. The highways running into Vermont from cities like Boston, New York, Holyoke and Springfield have become heroin pipelines. As Shumlin noted, heroin-related deaths nearly doubled in the last year alone, and the number of people treated for heroin addiction has increased an eye-popping 770 percent since 2000.

The speech seemed to shock the world, sparking national and international headlines. And when the actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death in New York earlier this week brought a new wave of attention to the national epidemic, Vermont’s heroin problem was again noted almost as a curiosity: Who knew pristine Vermont had such a nasty drug problem?

Who knew? I did. The pretty, popular girl isn’t my only former classmate who has overdosed. There was also the cute stoner guy I used to pass in the halls. The boy I knew in middle school. A girl I used to run into at the gas station. And others, whose names I struggle to remember.

When my family moved to Vermont from Long Island in 1992, we weren’t exactly met with open arms. It didn’t take long for me to understand why: Vermont draws lots of out-of-staters who move there thinking it’s some sort of promised land of maple syrup and covered bridges.

Vermont is beautiful—the view from our house was breathtaking, with rolling hills stretching for miles, full of grazing deer in the morning and howling coyotes at night. But the state is also more complicated than its reputation.

“I was expecting more overalls,” one family friend remarked during a visit a few years after we arrived. Another asked if my classmates wore clogs and pigtails to school. They dismissed my Vermont friends as hicks, and saw the state as a wholesome joke. “What kinda crime do they have up there? Someone stole a block of Cabot cheese?”

It’s not just out-of-staters who see Vermont this way—plenty of locals like to claim the state is immune to “big city problems.” But it’s not that there’s less dysfunction in Vermont. It just takes a different, often less visible, form.

My mother taught GED classes to troubled kids in Queens in the late 1980s. She claimed the problems she witnessed there paled in comparison to what she saw while teaching in rural Vermont. There may have been more crime in Queens, but the problems in Vermont were more disturbing: students coming to her with horrible tales of neglect and sexual abuse at home.

When I was in seventh grade, a friend told me behind a snow bank on the playground that she had been raped by her uncle. Another friend confided that her dad’s friend used to molest her at night. When she told her dad, he didn’t call the police; he just told his friend never to come over again.

There were a lot of secrets, and a lot of boredom. Kids would get wasted out on the cow pasture, mostly by drinking and smoking weed. But while some of my peers in high school took opiates like OxyContin, heroin was still frowned upon.

It’s amazing how fast that changed.

***

I left Vermont for college but came home during school breaks. Each time I did, it got harder to ignore how the drug was gradually taking root in the state. In 2003, I worked part-time at a drug store. When one of my coworkers, a thin blonde girl in her late teens, got fired, I asked why. She’d been caught shooting up on the job.

By then, my hometown of Barre had turned from a once respectable working class area into a dilapidated strip of empty store fronts, overrun with pregnant teens and heroin. What used to be an under-the-surface problem was now visibly corroding the town.

After graduation, I moved back and spent a few years working at WCAX, the state’s biggest news station. It seemed that every night there was another story about some dopehead robbing a Vermont drugstore demanding OxyContin.

The number of heroin addicts seemed to explode after OxyContin was redesigned in 2010, making it more expensive and harder to crush. Since Oxycontin is similar to heroin, heroin became the drug of choice. It’s now easier to find than weed in many parts of Vermont.

I went to rehab myself that year, following a cocaine binge in my home state. The facility was in upstate New York, which has similar demographics—and a similar heroin problem—to Vermont’s. Most of the people there were being treated for heroin addiction, by court order. They all seemed to have the same story: They didn’t start off on heroin. They started on pills.

One man told me he was addicted to OxyContin, but then his dealer claimed he ran out and offered him heroin instead. “You’re pretty much doing heroin anyway,” he said, “and it’s much cheaper than doing Oxys.”

It is cheaper. It’s also highly addictive.

I can’t count how many bodies of classmates and neighbors have been found in parking lots and on living room floors. In addition to the overdoses, there were also suicides—former neighbors and family friends who shot themselves to escape their addiction. And there were those who didn’t get physically hurt but nonetheless destroyed their lives, like the girl who grew up down the road from me who went to federal prison before she turned 20 for heroin trafficking and illegal weapons possession.

Heroin seems to have touched everyone I know in Vermont. Everyone has a relative, friend or neighbor who has been affected. And while the growth among people in my age group—25 to 34—has been nearly exponential, even younger people are using too. I recently talked to Vermont police who told me it’s becoming more and more common for teens to try heroin as their first drug instead of weed or mushrooms.

I wonder how many of those kids have any idea what they’re getting into. I think of my friend who, in her early twenties, tried heroin once “for fun.” She spent the night around the toilet and woke up the next day craving more.

***

I live in Brooklyn now, but this past fall a writer friend and I returned to Vermont to report on the heroin problem for VICE. We interviewed a guy named Josh, a heroin trafficker who happens to be my friend’s little brother. He agreed to speak on the record, telling us about how he mixes heroin with dirt, diluting the product so he can make more money, and about beating up other dealers to steal their supply.

After the article was published, Josh got death threats—something I never expected. I was actually disappointed with our investigation; the heroin problem is so pervasive I thought we could get something juicier, like photos from inside a big-time backwoods dealer’s crib. Josh’s story didn’t seem that surprising—there are so many Joshes in Vermont, troubled young adults who think it’s cool to be a dealer, even a low-level one. And to me it seemed clear that his arrogance was just a front for a lot of pain and desperation.

Josh reminded me a lot of Jen, a girl I knew growing up. She scared me back in middle school, when we rode the same bus, because she never smiled and often picked fights. We interviewed her, too, and I wasn’t shocked when she told us she had been in a lot of pain back then: Her mother had emotional problems and her father wasn’t around, so her home life was tumultuous. She left at age 15 and moved in with a much older boyfriend. They began selling dope to make easy money and eventually ended up in jail. She’s doing better now—she’s sober and is a loving mother—but she carries around a lot of guilt about her years as a trafficker.

Earlier this week, Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that Shumlin’s speech was “ visionary.” Personally, I think Shumlin was a little late to the game. But I agree his speech was a bold and necessary move. To me, the visionary part was that he wants to address heroin as a public health issue, not just a law-enforcement one. He recognizes addiction for what it is—a disease—and has compared being addicted to heroin to having cancer. Shumlin is proposing more education and more treatment centers—currently there are more than 500 addicts on waiting lists in Vermont. He has also made a call for rapid intervention programs so that addicts can get help when they’re most likely to be receptive to it. He wants to focus on healing, and getting real about the crisis.

“The time has come for us to stop quietly averting our eyes from the growing heroin addiction in our front yards,” Shumlin said, “while we fear and fight treatment facilities in our backyards.”

I’ve seen first-hand the denial of some Vermonters. The only negative responses I’ve gotten to my VICE article came from people who were upset that I was “tarnishing” the state’s reputation and not pointing out all the good things about Vermont. I’ve also heard friends from back home say that heroin only affects “lowlifes” or claim that if they steer clear of the “creeps,” heroin won’t affect them. This is false.

My hometown of Barre, for instance, has seen an onslaught of armed robberies, and police there told me the motels are full—not with tourists but with out-of-town gangs who set up shop and recruit local kids to sell their dope.

A few years ago, it may have been possible simply to look away—to focus instead on those striking pastoral landscapes. But that’s no longer the case. It’s time for Vermonters, and the rest of the country, to recognize that heroin is now nearly as much a part of our state’s identity as our beloved maple syrup and covered bridges.