PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — The problems of heroin, opioids and other addictive drugs are bringing together public health advocates, medical professionals and law enforcement to brainstorm new approaches.
In Aroostook County, the national issue of painkiller and heroin abuse has been showing up in increased overdoses, according to John Thyng, a physician’s assistant in the emergency department at The Aroostook Medical Center.
“When I first started here about 13 years ago, we would see maybe an overdose a month or every other month. Now we’re dealing with several overdoses a week and two or three drug seekers daily coming in to try to get narcotic pain pills,” Thyng said during at a community forum held earlier this month in Presque Isle by the governor’s drug task force.
In 2015, drug overdose deaths in Maine increased 31 percent to 272, with 57 of them caused by heroin and 111 caused by pharmaceutical opioids.
“We see a whole variety of drugs,” said Presque Isle police Chief Matt Irwin, recalling his five years on the job. “Heroin is on the rise now. What I’ve seen here is when bath salts are readily available, meth kind of trails off. Right now we’re in the swing where there’s more meth going on.”
Irwin said his department is trying to thwart drug dealers by “finding ways to feed information” to the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency — while acknowledging that “the war on drugs from a purely policing standpoint hasn’t worked.”
With a mix of expanded addiction treatment, drug courts and tough sentences for dealers, Irwin said he thinks Maine can confront its addiction problems.
“I come from a state where there’s a lot of drug problems and it’s been that way for decades,” said Irwin, who spent more than 20 years in law enforcement in Florida. “Coming up here, I think Maine has a chance to make this successful without falling into a cesspool like Florida has.”
On the treatment front, Maine is making progress, but needs more treatment beds and community options, said Peter McCorison, who is himself in long-term addiction recovery and is director of behavioral health services at the Aroostook Mental Health Center.
Currently, some area doctors and the center, which operates a recovery program on a farm in Limestone, provide the addiction treatment medications Suboxone, naltrexone and Vivitrol, McCorison said.
“It may not feel like it, but Aroostook County has led the way around access to treatment,” McCorison said.
“When we talk about substance misuse, we have to take our own personal values out of it, because that can really cloud the situation and it doesn’t help the person that’s addicted. They’ve already moved past the point that it’s against the law, it’s illegal and they shouldn’t be doing those things. At this point, in the state of Maine and around the country, we’re confronting a public health issue,” McCorison said.
“Recovery comes in lots of different forms. Treatment is a component of recovery, but many people find recovery without going to treatment,” he said. “They find it by going to church, getting involved in a peer recovery group, or they just decide to stop. It happens with alcohol, opiates and other drugs.”
Drug users stopping opioids, heroin or methamphetamines have a “psychologically crushing” experience, even though their physical symptoms aren’t life-threatening, McCorison said. For that, he argues that the state needs more rehabilitation beds and outpatient services, as well as “social detox” facilities, as an “in-between place where people could go for four or five or six days for the start of their recovery process.”