About 1,200 people from across the state filled Bangor’s Cross Insurance Center Thursday for Gov. Janet Mills’ annual opioid response summit, her final such gathering before her second term concludes at the end of this year.
Mills and other speakers touted progress made under her administration toward curbing overdose deaths and other effects of the opioid epidemic. The event came as fatal overdoses are on the decline in Maine, although Penobscot County is the only one in which they rose slightly last year.
“We have tragically lost people that we love and that we miss every day,” Jennifer Gunderman, Bangor’s public health director, told the crowd. “We come together in Bangor, where we have the highest fatal overdose rates in the state,” she added, also referencing the Bangor area’s HIV outbreak that primarily affects people who use injection drugs and are homeless.
The city and state have struggled to tamp down those intersecting crises, prompting growing frustration among Bangor residents across the political spectrum.
“We have a divided community, fueled by stigma, that is evident in city meetings and on social media,” Gunderman said.
Mills praised the Bangor City Council’s efforts to address homelessness in an interview with reporters, saying, “It’s a difficult problem. We are addressing it. The city council is making good progress, I think.”
In her address to attendees, the governor lauded her administration’s efforts to combat the opioid epidemic over her eight years in office, including her expansion of Maine’s Medicaid program, work to make the overdose-reversing medication naloxone available throughout the state and the creation of the Home for Good program, which will provide more than 200 supportive housing units for chronically homeless people.
“When I became governor, I knew that what Maine had been doing for so many years just wasn’t working,” Mills said. She celebrated the multiyear decline in overdose deaths but added, “every overdose death is a tragic and preventable loss.”
Last year, 390 people died from overdoses in Maine, including 67 in Penobscot County — 17% of fatal overdoses statewide, for a county that makes up only 11% of the population.
Gordon Smith, Mills’ opioid response director, told the Bangor Daily News that he doesn’t think Penobscot County’s difficulty reducing overdose deaths is a uniquely Bangor problem, but rather a sign that Maine has had more trouble preventing those deaths in urban areas.
“Portland’s in the same situation,” he said. “We’ve had vast improvements in the rural areas, and in the urban areas not so much.”
This could be because people who have substance use disorders gravitate toward service centers like Bangor, where there are more resources, Smith said.
Hannah Pingree, the Mills-backed Democratic gubernatorial nominee who previously led the governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, attended the summit and told the BDN, “The fact that we have now saved lives and the overdose death rate is down is really good news, so I’m running for governor to continue this progress.”
The former Maine House Speaker added that she thinks the state needs to do more prevention work around substance abuse and that as governor, she’d prioritize preserving access to primary healthcare and recovery services amid Trump administration funding cuts as a key part of opioid response.
Mills gave Pingree a shoutout in her speech and later told the crowd, “Make sure the next person who occupies the Blaine House appreciates all that we’ve been working on together for so long.”