AUGUSTA, Maine — Gov. Paul LePage’s planned Aug. 26 summit on drug abuse adds a new chapter to a 25-year effort to combat drug addiction in Maine by gathering state and local leaders to talk about the problem.
In the past 19 years, there have been more than 90 reports and surveys produced on the topics of drug abuse and prevention, all of which are listed on Maine Office of Substance Abuse’s website. There have been dozens of forums and brainstorming sessions at the local level on topics from marijuana all the way to heroin. With so much focus on the topic over the years — and with LePage having shown resistance to the generation of reports and studies — what benefit could come from another summit?
“This is not the beginning, nor the end of this discussion,” LePage spokeswoman Adrienne Bennett said earlier this month. “It’s merely one step forward.”
In 1987, Republican Gov. John McKernan was the first chief executive of Maine to call for a summit on the issue. It was called “The First Blaine House Conference on Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention, Education, Treatment and Law Enforcement.”
Since then, there have been dozens of drug abuse summits all over Maine, a state identified by health professionals as having one of the worst opioid addiction problems in the nation. Now, following a crackdown on the circulation of prescription pills, the opioid of choice for addicts is becoming heroin.
Drug abuse is rampant across the United States and throughout the world. If there were easy solutions, there wouldn’t be so much addiction. The fight against addiction unfolds on the streets, in hospital emergency rooms and in myriad treatment and support agencies, not at meetings. So what is the value of gathering again to talk about the problem?
Chief executive action
Drug abuse summits usually happen in reaction to perceived crises.
LePage called this month’s summit shortly after a highly publicized weekend in Portland in early August when 14 heroin overdoses, including two deaths, were reported within 24 hours. Last year, 208 people died of drug overdoses in Maine, with deaths attributed to heroin rising to 57 from 34 in 2013.
In 1987, McKernan saw a similar problem developing, particularly with alcohol. A state report had found alcohol to be a significant factor in half of all fatal motor vehicle accidents, 80 percent of fire deaths, 60 percent of child abuse cases and 36 percent of pedestrian accidents. In addition, the McKernan administration wrote in a report after the summit that efforts to curb alcohol and drug use were happening too much in isolation.
“If Maine is to effectively utilize its resources, it must re-evaluate not only existing systems, but also how these systems interact,” the report reads.
A year later, McKernan convened “The Second Blaine House Conference on Alcohol and other Drug Abuse Prevention, Education, Treatment and Law Enforcement.” Whereas the first conference focused on identifying the problem, the second zeroed in on solutions such as better OUI and liquor law enforcement and creating partnerships between schools and communities.
Dozens upon dozens of local drug forums
For many years, most of the action on fighting drug abuse happened at the local level.
According to information compiled by the Maine Law and Legislative Reference Library, there have been several dozen community-level meetings about the drug abuse problem in Maine during the past 15 years — and those include just the ones that attracted newspaper reporters.
Their frequency increased suddenly in 2003, mostly in the northern half of Maine, in response to a huge increase in drug abuse over the prior 18 months. In that year alone, there were at least five separate forums in Bangor, Jonesport, Southwest Harbor and other locations around Mount Desert Island.
The public has proven finicky about attending events like these.
A May 2003 forum on Mount Desert Island attracted a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200. But in April 2004, a similar forum for which more than 600 invitations were circulated, attracted only seven people, more than half of them organizers. A June 2006 drug-abuse summit in Caribou attracted 1,200 attendees, yet a May 2007 forum in Waterville attracted no one other than a reporter and a photographer. Only three people showed for another forum in Augusta a few weeks earlier.
“I guess I’m not surprised,” David Doreau, who in 2007 was a licensed drug and alcohol counselor in Waterville, told the Morning Sentinel at the time. “There’s kind of a barrier in most people’s minds to any kind of an educational thing and maybe that’s a lesson to us. I think it’s kind of a learned helplessness. A lot of people feel like they can’t make much of a difference in their own families on this issue.”
There have been state-level efforts since LePage took office.
In 2011, then-Attorney General William Schneider convened a wide-ranging drug summit in Northport, which, a year later, led LePage and Schneider to create the Maine Prescription Drug Abuse Task Force. The recommendations out of that summit were as follows:
— Train doctors to treat pain while preventing addiction;
— Improve statewide education efforts to reduce prescription pill abuse;
— Expand the state’s prescription monitoring program;
— Develop more frequent and better medication disposal programs.
Studies upon studies upon studies
There is ample data on drug abuse statistics and proposed solutions, and they’re all posted online.
The Maine Office of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services maintains a long list of past published reports dating from 1996 through this year. There are more than 90 reports and surveys listed on the websites. The most recent document in that series, a 120-page behemoth produced by a consulting group, was posted last month: Substance Abuse Trends in Maine: State Epidemiological Profile 2015.
A conspicuous absence
A theme among nearly all these efforts, according to one advocate, has been a lack of input from addicts.
In recent months, there has been considerable friction between LePage and some lawmakers about where to allocate more resources in the fight against addiction. While LePage has been pushing to hire more law enforcement and court officers, others have said that there’s no arresting our way out of the problem and that more focus needs to be put on addiction treatment.
Darren Ripley, program coordinator for the Maine Alliance for Addiction Recovery, said there’s a third leg of that stool that isn’t receiving enough attention: recovery services. Those include programs to help former addicts return to being productive, sober members of society by helping them find housing, transportation, jobs and ongoing counseling.
“Most of these summits are all just lip service,” Ripley said. “I commend Gov. LePage for taking steps to convene this summit, but there’s more to it than that. … Are people who are in recovery going to be invited? You need to hear the voice of the people in early recovery and in long-term recovery. Those are the voices that need to be heard.”
Arresting drug dealers and putting as many addicts as possible in treatment are laudable goals, Ripley said, but the crucial juncture in the the fight against drugs is helping people who have sworn away that lifestyle maintain their resolve. Ripley, a recovering addict, has not been invited to LePage’s summit.
“It’s still that stigma we have about addicts,” Ripley said. “It’s like we’re saying, ‘Do we want those people there, because then we’ll have to hear the truth and we’d really rather not.’ We get a lot of anecdotal information, but let’s get it from the people that drug addiction is affecting. Let’s hear from the parents, the spouses and the children of drug addicts. Let’s hear a mother who lost her child to an overdose say that she never expected that to have happened. Let’s talk to them. Let’s hear from them.”
