Apr 25, 2016 3 min read

Can there be anyone out there who still doubts how pervasive drug addiction is in this community? Certainly not anyone who has paid attention to local news lately.

The number of robberies at banks and convenience stores has increased dramatically in the past two years, and the evidence is clear that the typical perpetrator of these crimes isn’t trying to put food on the family table; he wants to put drugs in his body.

Even more alarming than this rash of holdups has been a series of brazen daylight robberies outside the Medicine Shoppe on busy Jefferson Avenue.

Last Tuesday, a woman walking across the parking lot with her children at 10:50 a.m. had prescription medicine grabbed from her hand by a man who jumped into the passenger seat of a vehicle, which then fled quickly, almost hitting the woman’s 2-year-old daughter. It was the third such incident in the same location in less than a week. Three bags of prescription drugs were snatched from a female delivery driver at 2:30 the previous Thursday afternoon. And the day before that, an Ohio woman leaving the pharmacy was knocked to the ground and had her purse ripped from her hands at 1:30 p.m.

It’s not as if the parking lot of the Medicine Shoppe is secluded; it’s right on a busy commercial section of Jefferson Avenue a block from Washington Junior-Senior High School where both vehicular and pedestrian traffic is heavy. And it’s not as if the same person is committing these crimes, because the descriptions of the robbers given to police are quite different.

Safe to say, if these incidents can occur in this place and at these times, they can happen anywhere. And if we cannot feel safe walking about in public in the middle of the day, we have lost a community’s most valuable asset.

The overprescription of pain medication in this country and the availability of cheap and highly addictive heroin have created hundreds of thousands of addicts, many of willing to do anything to feed their habits.

We are suffering from the effects of this trend here, and the proof of it can be seen in the Police Beat columns in this newspaper almost every day.

Positioning police or armed guards at all our banks, convenience stores and pharmacies would be ridiculously expensive and is not the solution to the problem. To halt this crime wave would require an attack on its sources: those reasons that people seek escape with drugs in the first place.

In the meantime, we need to realize the scope of the problem and get as many drug users into treatment programs as we can.