This commentary is by Hannah Riley Fernandez, the director of programming at the Center for Just Journalism.  A recent feature in the Atlantic argues that treating addiction as a health crisis instead of a crime has turned cities like Seattle and Burlington into wreckage, and that the fix is mo re policing and forced treatment. It’s a well-written story. It’s also completely wrong, and the timing is bad: Burlington’s city council is debating a resolution on downtown public safety and the city’s approach to harm reduction, prompted in part by an open letter from local business owners. Burlington didn’t wind up in this Atlantic piece by accident. We are often reduced to a stock character in national outlets that use “progressive city” as shorthand for failure; Fox News alone has run several features on Burlington’s drug crisis since 2021, tied back to the 2020 vote to shrink the police force and to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., having been mayor here. Once a city becomes a stock example rather than a place, reporting stops asking what’s really happening and starts mining it for scenes that confirm the story’s premise, pressuring officials to perform toughness instead of sticking with what works. The author of the Atlantic story describes Burlington the way visiting writers often do: a phalanx of dealers and drug users in City Hall Park, needles in flower boxes, a woman injecting on the sidewalk near someone’s front porch. Those images are real; no one, myself included, would call Vermont’s drug crisis fiction. Being frustrated that it hasn’t been resolved is fair — nobody wants to step around a needle on their way to work. But arrest and forced treatment don’t shorten a drug crisis; they extend it. Frustration or impatience aren’t reasons to give up on what’s working: Vermont’s overdose deaths have fallen for three consecutive years, and the ways Burlington is responding to the crisis are grounded in decades of research. The Vermont Department of Health’s 2025 report, released months before the piece went to print, found 170 deaths last year, down 37% from the 2022 peak of 269. Officials attribute the decline, in part, to the infrastructure of harm reduction, including naloxone distribution, syringe services, and Vermont’s hub-and-spoke treatment model. The writer doesn’t ignore harm-reduction research so much as wave it off, conceding it exists but arguing it’s outweighed by other factors. The specifics say otherwise. The 2011 peer-reviewed study of Vancouver’s Insite — a supervised injection site — in the Lancet found a 35% drop in overdose deaths near the facility, versus 9% citywide. OnPoint NYC, the country’s first sanctioned overdose prevention center, has intervened in more than 2,000 overdoses since 2021 without a single on-site death. He calls San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston evidence that stricter approaches work — cities that have escalated arrests and, in Boston’s case, moved to detain drug users and force treatment on them against their will. Massachusetts’ own data on forced treatment, under its Section 35 law, says otherwise: people committed involuntarily were 1.4 times more likely to die of an overdose than those treated voluntarily, and a global review of compulsory treatment studies found 78% showed no benefit, or outright harm.  READ MORE Arrests don’t work either. A JAMA-published study of drug seizures in San Francisco found overdoses spiked within days, within 100 to 500 meters of every police bust, as people scatter, use faster and avoid calling for help out of fear of arrest. And arrests don’t even shrink the drug market they’re meant to disrupt: Burlington’s mayor has called enforcement against dealers a “whack-a-mole” problem — arrest one, another takes their spot — which is hardly evidence that caging people in Vermont will fix a supply chain running through Mexico and China. Plus, incarceration isn’t cheap. Vermont spends roughly $134,000 a year to cage one person, the second-highest rate in the country, at a moment when the state is scrambling to close budget gaps and warning of big property tax hikes. The math doesn’t favor the harder line, either: the Washington State Institute for Public Policy found that every dollar spent on community drug treatment returns more than $18 in savings from reduced crime, while prison spending returns 37 cents.  Throughout the piece, correlation becomes causation, and only in one convenient direction. Overdoses are high in cities with harm reduction; therefore, harm reduction caused them — never mind they’re also high in places without it, driven by the same national fentanyl supply. By that logic, hospitals cause disease, because that’s where most sick people are. None of this means Burlington’s problems are imaginary, or that the people quoted are wrong about their experiences. Part of the problem is that this debate keeps getting framed as a referendum on values — are you compassionate, or are you serious about public safety — instead of a question with an actual answer. Arrests and forced treatment might feel like the answer, but feeling right and working are not the same thing, and coverage that treats them as one leaves readers unable to tell the difference. Read the story on VTDigger here: Blaming addicts for Burlington’s problems misses the point. ...read more read less