On a hot, sunny Sunday in June, as the sun was setting, a group of people gathered on a dirt path outside a house in the rural section of West Virginia.
At one end, a family of four gathered, including their three-year-old daughter, with a handful of other women and men.
At the other end, two young men, both white, were huddled in the shade of a tree, waiting for the sun to set.
The sun was already beginning to rise when they came across the man with a cane, a bearded man in a cowboy hat, walking around the yard, peering into the trees.
The woman in the yellow shirt was talking to a neighbor, and she said, “He looks like he’s on drugs.”
“Oh my God,” said the woman.
“Oh, my God!” said the other woman.
They all began laughing.
The men all looked up and said, What’s going on?
Then they turned around and walked away.
The next morning, the women said they had just met the man who had just walked through their front door.
The neighbors called the police.
The man was arrested.
On Tuesday, he was released on a $2,500 bond.
He has since been charged with public intoxication, disorderly conduct and trespassing.
The community is now shocked.
They’ve never seen anything like it before.
And it has left some of the neighbors wondering if he was on drugs.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this before,” said Kathy Brown, who lives a few doors down from the family.
“It’s just a very strange feeling to be walking around with this cane and seeing someone walking around, and you know, people who look like this.
It just makes me sick to my stomach.”
The woman who had met the stranger said the police had told her she was too drunk to know whether he was sober or not.
“We’ve never been that drunk before,” she said.
“And now he’s just walking around like that.
I can’t believe it.
It’s very strange.”
The incident has reignited an already-tense national debate about whether to legalize herbal medicine in the United States.
Some states have already legalized herbal medicine.
Vermont’s Board of Pharmacy voted last month to begin regulating herbal products and, after months of back-and-forth on whether to do so, voted unanimously last week to allow herbal medicine to be sold at pharmacies and medical facilities.
The decision to allow the herbal products to be on the shelves came as a surprise to the Vermont Department of Health.
Vermont has long been a leader in the fight against illicit drugs.
In 2014, the state enacted a law that prohibits all forms of the drug fentanyl, an opioid similar to heroin that can be snorted, smoked, injected or injected.
In 2015, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a law banning the use of the deadly drug in the state, saying it was unconstitutional.
And last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would have legalized herbal medicines in the U .
S. and banned the sale of prescription opioid drugs.
But a federal judge blocked the bill from becoming law in January.
The Obama administration appealed the decision, saying that the drug ban violates the U to the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
The Supreme Court, in a ruling last month, said that the government can regulate and regulate, but cannot force patients to take the drugs.
The White House has said it plans to review the decision and could appeal the case to the Supreme Court.