Leadership Quote by Ken Salazar

“Meth” is doing heavy political work here: not just naming a drug, but sketching a map of shared vulnerability. Salazar’s line collapses the usual red-state/blue-state geography of addiction by pairing “urban areas” with “most of the rural areas of Colorado,” a deliberate refusal of the comforting story that hard drugs belong to someone else’s neighborhood. The phrase “No region has been immune” is public-health language dressed as moral urgency, an argument built to disarm local exceptionalism and, by extension, local resistance to statewide action.

The word “scourge” signals intent as much as outrage. It’s old-biblical, civic-sermon diction: a way to frame meth not as a series of individual choices but as an invading force. That framing invites two policy moves at once. First, it legitimizes aggressive law enforcement and interdiction (“getting larger” implies an enemy gaining ground). Second, it creates space for public spending on treatment and prevention by casting the problem as collective and escalating, not contained and manageable.

Contextually, Salazar is speaking as a Colorado politician who understands the state’s internal divide: booming metros alongside isolated towns with fewer services, longer response times, and tight-knit reputations that make addiction easy to hide and hard to treat. By insisting the crisis is everywhere, he’s also negotiating stigma. If meth is statewide, seeking help becomes less a confession of personal failure and more a rational response to a common threat. That’s the rhetorical pivot: turning shame into mandate, and mandate into political permission.