Hub and Spoke. Audio Collective.

This is Rumble Strip, I'm Erica Heilman.

We find needles, piles and piles of empty needles that are all through the courtyard.

So when people are like walking their dogs or their little kid runs over and trips and falls,

there's like needles.

So it's like right under the surface, it's very David Lynch. It's very blue velvet. It's like we might not have a ear we could have an ear

But it's like we have like right under the surface of bucolic green Vermont are like pointy

needles and caps all waiting for some unsuspecting person to be like oh my

God we have a huge opiate problem because I just stepped on it.

That's Susan Randall by the train tracks in Virgins, which happened to run right by her new office.

Susan has been a private investigator here in Vermont for 24 years,

and she's an old friend of mine, and every once in a while we get together and we compare notes on work, kids, on cancer, once we talked about owls.

Sometimes I make shows about these conversations. So if you haven't heard

Susan before I recommend going back and listening to some of the previous shows.

But anyway I drove over to visit Susan at her new office, which, like I said, is right on the train tracks in Virgins, and we sat on a little deck overlooking the tracks and we talked.

It was not a cheerful talk. It was more a rageful talk that ends up in

heartbreak. Susan has been working for most of her adult life fiercely defending the

rights of people accused of crimes, and many of these crimes

involve drug addiction in one way or another.

And this summer, Susan was robbed in broad daylight by a person with a terrible heroin addiction. Drug-related crime has skyrocketed

in Burlington, car theft, bike theft, burglary, overdoses, and there is no end or no obvious solution in sight.

Anyway in this show Susan tells me the story of what happened and where it has left her at

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