BREWER, Maine — The fact Maine has an ongoing problem with drug addiction shouldn’t be news to anyone.
Since the late 1990s, drug abuse trends have shifted from prescription opiates to heroin, a cheaper alternative, after a crackdown on pharmacy robberies made those harder to get, Brewer police Capt. Christopher Martin said this week.
A recent spike in drug overdose deaths prompted Maine Attorney General Janet Mills to issue a report in August warning that the number of overdoses from heroin and fentanyl in Maine are on the rise, while the overall number of drug overdose deaths is on track to be similar to 2014, which was the worst year on record.
Consequently, the Brewer Police Department and its community partners are teaming up to bring a group of nationally known addiction treatment advocates back to Maine for a repeat presentation.
The presentation, titled “Heroin: Stop the Demand,” will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 21, at the Brewer Performing Arts Center.
Brewer high school students saw the presentation last November, but an evening session planned for the community was canceled because of an early snowstorm that knocked out power to an estimated 140,000 Mainers.
The program features Marie Allen, a Delaware mother who has devoted her life to educating young people about the dangers of addiction after losing her daughter, Erin, to a heroin overdose. The book she wrote based on her daughter’s journal entries will be available for $5 purchase during the event, Martin said.
“The message is a good message, and it’s a real message. Addiction and opiate addiction is not pretty and the end result of this journey, absent any kind of recovery or treatment, is a premature and untimely death. There’s no other way that the script goes,” Martin said Wednesday.
“Across the state, we’re losing a person to a drug overdose death every 40 hours is what our rolling statistic for this year has been and a majority of that has been heroin related and heroin with fentanyl mixture,” he said. “This is a pretty deadly concoction. It’s costing us lives and every life has value.”
As Martin sees it, Maine has made headway on the law enforcement front but it has done little to get at the root of the problem — demand for heroin and other opiate-based drugs. A key way to reduce that demand is through increased access to treatment and recovery services for those addicted. He hopes that next week’s presentation will spur the community into action.
“For every dollar we spend on recovery, we’re going to have a $6 return down the road, as opposed to a straight up incarceration model. Being fiscally responsible, it makes sense to invest in recovery,” he said. While that may cost more up front, the end result would be fewer people in jail and reduced medical and criminal costs and a healthier population, he said.
“We have to do something about that so people have a way out of this,” he said. “Revolving in and out of jail is not an answer.”