Beth Macy reads at Woodstock bookstore to raise money for Harrisonburg nonprofit Strength in Peers

There's nothing wrong with a candidate carving out a Saturday to read from her own book and hand the proceeds to a peer-support nonprofit. Strength in Peers does real work in Harrisonburg helping people who are trying to stay clean, and a sold-out crowd at a little bookstore in Woodstock says something good about that community. We're not going to pretend charity is a bad look just because the person doing it has a D next to her name on a ballot somewhere in Virginia.

But it's worth asking what campaigning "on the opioid crisis" actually means when it looks like this. Beth Macy built her name writing about Purdue Pharma and the pill mills, and that story matters. It's just not the whole story anymore. The fentanyl killing people in Shenandoah County today isn't coming from a drug rep's sample bag. It's coming across the southern border, cut by cartels, sold cheap, and it doesn't care how compelling your book tour is. A reading and a raffle at a yarn shop is a nice afternoon. It's not a policy.

If a candidate wants credit for caring about addiction, fine, but voters in the Valley deserve to hear what she'd actually do about supply, about interdiction, about funding programs like Strength in Peers past the campaign season when the cameras and the bookstore crowds are gone. Feel-good events photograph well. Fixing this problem requires saying some things that don't.