In May of 2024, we noted Olivia Reingold’s reporting that addiction activists say they’re ‘reducing harm’ in Philly, but Kensington locals say they’re causing it. Of course, Miss Reingold’s article appeared in The Free Press, a site which is definitely not free, and was started by the liberal, but certainly not #woke^[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading leftist Bari Weiss, whom our good friends on the left now hate because she’s trying to right the ship — meaning: reduce the liberal bias — on CBS News.

But what happens when the story comes via the Boston Globe? Will the left pay any more attention?

Along the banks of Lake Champlain, who’s harming whom?

By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff | Friday, August 28, 2026 | 7:12 PM EDT

BURLINGTON, Vt. — The college kids are back. Summer’s holding on. And Lake Champlain is shimmering, shining, as the song goes, like a National guitar.

Despite the often-stunning brilliance and laid-back, tolerant vibe of Burlington, enrollment at the University of Vermont has fallen precipitously.

The university’s response is to beef up and improve its athletic facilities, which is all well and good.

But while it is impossible to quantify, it is also impossible to deny that the falling popularity of UVM has at least something to do with Burlington’s sketchy downtown area.

Aggressive panhandling, people shooting up in public, open drug sales, doorways and public parks full of those with nowhere to live, and an official laissez-faire attitude about all that antisocial behavior isn’t a great advertisement for the state’s flagship university when parents are college-shopping with their kids.

The newspaper has a paywall, but columnist Alec MacGillis provided a gift link here.

How liberal is Vermont? In 2024, the state gave Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff her largest margin of victory, as her 235,791 votes, 63.83%, almost doubled President Donald Trump’s 119,395 (32.32%). Chittenden County, where Burlington is, went for Mrs Emhoff even more strongly, 72,656 (74.65%), to Mr Trump’s 20,937 (21.51%).

After a section in which Vermonter August Letendre described a harrowing encounter with Burlington’s junkies — no, of course the Globe article didn’t use the term ‘junkies,’ but we use it, because it’s accurate and doesn’t mealy-mouth the situation — we get this:

The approach that Letendre and many others say is not working is called harm reduction, which focuses on minimizing the negative health, social, and legal consequences associated with drug use. As proponents here like to say, harm reduction is about meeting people with care, not judgment.

In practical terms, that means the guy shooting up in a public park as kids walk by isn’t arrested, or even urged to move along. Instead, he’s given clean needles.

The two most prominent and progressive elected leaders who support harm reduction, Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak and Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, insist their approach is working, slowly but surely, and that the alternative of rousting or locking up offenders doesn’t work.

But, as August Letendre and others ask, what good is harm reduction if in the process it harms others, including children?

That was the problem noted by Miss Reingold, that “harm reduction” wasn’t actually reducing harm to the junkies, but simply transferring the harm to other people, in that case the decent people of Kensington, ‘reducing’ the harm to the junkies sleeping on sidewalks and in doorways by transferring it to the people who lived in the houses which had junkies sleeping in the doorways.

According to the Census Bureau, Burlington’s population as of July 1, 2025, was 44,019 souls, down from 44,744 in the 2020 Census. 84.1% of the population were non-Hispanic white, 2.9% were black, and 4.2% Asian. 95.2% of residents 25 years old and up had been graduated from high school, with 60.5% having earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. The preliminary unemployment rate in June, 2026, for Burlington was just 2.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What a perfect liberal city!

Yet a perfectly beautiful downtown is infested with junkies, to the extent that the Globe noticed.

As dawn broke one day last week, some of the denizens sleeping in the doorways, sidewalks, and parking garages along College Street and at City Hall Park began to stir.

A man with one sneaker in his hand and the other on his foot walked gingerly to a park bench, while his companion, still wrapped in their sleeping bag on the sidewalk, pointed and laughed at a squirrel who cut across his path.

It was dead quiet up on Church Street. At Lippa’s, a family-run jewelry store that has been downtown for 93 years, a sign in the window notes they have thrown in the towel, moving to neighboring, suburban Colchester.

Western civilization depends upon people being personally responsible, of acting in a civilized manner toward one another. Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak and the very ‘progressive’ prosecutor, State’s Attorney George^[2]“She opposes cash bail and doesn’t prosecute shoplifting or minor traffic violations, saying people of color are disproportionately targeted,” according to the Globe article. How does … Continue reading are taking a very liberal path, but it is one that does not work. It ‘reduces harm’ to the junkies by transferring it to the law-abiding people, and the law-abiding people, the civilized public, are too thoroughly consumed with being nice and kind to do anything about it.

But it has to be asked: are our good friends on the left actually reducing harm, are they in any way helping the panhandlers and the junkies by enabling their ‘lifestyles’? Letting an addict stay an addict just means living on the streets longer, letting the open wounds caused by “tranq,” an animal tranquilizer that has been used to ‘cut’ street drugs and which has reached Burlington. Perhaps Miss George doesn’t think it helps to arrest junkies, but her policies simply leave them to die in the streets.