Ridge Runner Chronicles – March 23, 2022
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West Point and Cocaine
By Bill Hoagland
When I was in high school, one of my classmates got accepted to West Point. This classmate never hung out with us beer-drinking teenage idiots. He was truly a straight-arrow (and a nice guy to boot). The next year, one of the kids in my neighborhood got accepted to West Point; he, too, never ran with us. Then, when I was on active duty in the US Army, I was assigned for a period of time to the prestigious US Army Command and General Staff College, where most of the students were West Point grads on their way to becoming generals. At that point, I was forever convinced that West Pointers were truly “America’s finest.” And after returning to civilian life, I got to know additional former West Point grads. Without exception, I have regarded every one of them that I have met as “America’s finest.”
But this past week, I heard about the five West Point cadets who were on spring break in Florida and who overdosed on cocaine infused with fentanyl. This news is not just “concerning”; it is depressing. It is depressing for a lot of reasons. First, it highlights just how much drug addiction has crept into the very best of our society. It is also depressing for me personally because I feel I have been living on another planet for years; I had no idea there was a potential drug problem at West Point. Finally, it is depressing because in the past year, we have had 100,000 deaths due to drug overdoses and 60,000 of these deaths are directly related to fentanyl yet we don’t seem to be doing much about it.
So I decided to do some research about fentanyl. Fentanyl is a high powered pain killer designed to take the place of some traditional painkillers such as Demerol. It is prescribed for persons in extreme pain and is often used to “make the death experience painless”; in fact, fentanyl is one of the ingredients currently used to execute death row inmates in Nebraska. But over the years, fentanyl became available without a prescription because China began mass production of the drug and selling it on the internet. More recently, it is being created in illegal labs in Mexico and elsewhere. It is highly addictive and downright dangerous for anyone coming in physical contact with it. One very scary symptom of fentanyl use is “the wooden chest syndrome”, in which the user’s respiratory muscles freeze up and the user is unable to breath. Once that happens, oxygen is cut off to the brain and things go quickly downhill from there.
You have to wonder why anyone would run the risk of getting “the wooden chest syndrome” and all that flows from that. I am told it is because by adding fentanyl to cocaine or heroin, the user gets that extra “boost” needed by serious drug addicts. So here is my question: when these five cadets were out looking to score some cocaine, did they intentionally seek out cocaine spiked with fentanyl? I seriously doubt these cadets could have been addicted to cocaine while attending West Point, but really, what do I know? Apparently not much.
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■ Bill Hoagland has practiced law in Alton for more than 50 years, but he has spent more than 70 years hunting, fishing and generally being in the great outdoors. His wife, Annie, shares his love of the outdoor life. Much of their spare time is spent on their farm in Calhoun County. Bill can be reached at [email protected].
