Editor,
To the Tucker County youth, whether you’re grade school, middle, or high school, may this message find you and find you well. Especially now with Prom just around the corner for a lot of you. Chemical warfare is being waged on us in the form of fentanyl, and you kids are the primary target, it sickens me to say it.
It isn’t my intention to scare you. Honest to God it isn’t. But we’ve got to address the fifty thousand kilo dragon in the room that’s killing well over a hundred thousand Americans a year by the Chinese government and the Mexican cartels who are shipping this nightmare into our neighborhoods, en masse.
Let me just say to start, as someone who grew up as a kid in the 80’s and a teenager in the 90’s, I cannot even begin to fathom how hard it is for you growing up in these times. With the myriad of utter madness you’re exposed to on a daily basis. As a grown man, with only a cat to take care of and a house to tend to, I’m barely able to hold it together myself, as I marvel in horror at how fast the nation is going down in flames, from every conceivable vector imaginable.
But, with a glass of Jim Beam I guess I manage, I’m not proud to say. Especially, knowing how many have it worse than me. I can’t help but feel like a complete craven failure to not just myself, but my fellow humans for not doing more. On many a late night. Such as this one.
Perhaps we’re more blessed than other areas of the country, in the sense that we are better insulated from this poison than say, Manchester, New Hampshire or Flint, Michigan or even Huntington, West Virginia, for that matter. But I have to believe at this point that we as a nation are unreservedly saturated in fentanyl. Saturated.
I graduated from Elkins High in ’98. Went to WVU after that, when Morgantown at the time was notoriously the college party town of the nation. Per capita, the city of fifty thousand was drinking for a million, with the students no doubt imbibing the lion’s share. The partying and drug experimenting even back then was dangerous. Christ knows I did some monumentally stupid things in those days that could’ve killed me. And of course we knew people who did die in my high school and college years. From pills, usually.
But now. Today. Anything and everything is laced with fentanyl. Police officers die just from accidentally touching it. It’s killed toddlers in city parks who find it on the ground. It’s fused in most recreational drugs. Cocaine. Pills. Even marijuana joints. It’s slipped in drinks at even the most seemingly innocuous parties.
The world ain’t what it used to be, kids. I’m sorry for that. But for the sake of your future, you have got to steer clear of it all.
Be well.
Christopher Phares
Thomas, WV 26292