Even as Gov. Paul LePage warns others against making up their own facts, it’s far from unusual for him to commit that exact transgression.
Lies have consequences, especially coming from a state’s chief executive. When it comes to addiction, lies have consequences for people’s lives. They can affect the public’s understanding of this public health crisis and how it should be addressed.
On more than one occasion, LePage has related the fallacious tale of a student at Portland’s Deering High School who, the governor says, overdosed and was revived three separate times by naloxone in one week.
“And the third one he got up and went to class,” LePage said at a recent town hall forum in Lewiston, according to the Portland Press Herald. “He didn’t go to the hospital. He didn’t get checked out. He was so used to it he just came out of it and went to class. So, what that does is it will deteriorate our society.”
Naloxone, administered by injection or nasal spray, immediately reverses an opioid overdose by attaching to the same parts of the brain as heroin and other opioids — such as morphine, oxycodone or other prescription pain relievers — and blocking their effects for 30 to 90 minutes. Naloxone saves lives because it stops respiratory depression, in which a drug user’s breathing dramatically and dangerously slows following an overdose. The revival gives drug users the opportunity to receive medical attention — then, the chance to be referred to the addiction treatment they need.
It’s well established that LePage’s tale of the Deering High School student is flat-out false. A reporter from MPBN and a BDN columnist checked the claim with the school’s principal and revealed it never happened. The Portland Press Herald twice checked the claim with Portland’s superintendent of schools, who told the paper it was false, “unequivocally.”
What’s less well established is that LePage was so far from telling the truth that the tale he related isn’t even possible. The nature of an overdose and a naloxone shot is such that there’s just no way for someone to build up a tolerance for naloxone and be unaffected to the point where he can just return to class as though nothing ever happened.
“They go into immediate and deep opioid withdrawal,” Dr. Noah Nesin, vice president of medical affairs at Penobscot Community Health Care in Bangor, said. “They feel awful. They’re disoriented. Their muscles are aching.
“The idea that somebody could hop up and say, ‘Let’s get back to that algebra test,’ is absurd.”
The most common symptoms of withdrawal are akin to the flu, combined with anxiety and agitation. Sweating, runny noses and muscle aches are common early on, followed by abdominal cramping, nausea and vomiting. When the naloxone wears off in as little as 20 minutes, the drug user risks returning to the distressed state of an overdose.
To think a drug user would return to class afterward as if nothing happened defies reality. Once he or she comes to, a drug user is most likely to focus on stopping the pain of withdrawal, which involves securing another fix of heroin.
“It’s not a soap opera miracle awakening,” said Nesin, who is working with the Bangor Police Department to equip its officers with naloxone. “It’s a miserable experience.”
And it’s a similarly miserable experience every time a drug user receives a shot of naloxone.
As LePage spreads misconceptions about the overdose antidote — either at public forums or in his April veto message for a bill to make naloxone more widely available, in which he claimed that naloxone “does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose” — he takes the debate about addiction to a dark place. Instead of focusing on the best options for saving more lives, the governor has steered the debate away from evidence and facts and toward judgments on whether the lives of those with addictions are worth saving.