The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Courtney Allen is the organizing director of the Maine Recovery Advocacy Project.
On this International Overdose Awareness Day, and every day, the recovery and harm reduction community in Maine mourns the senseless loss of our friends, our family members, and even of our fellow organizers. Today and everyday, we are painfully aware that overdoses in Maine and across the nation continue to skyrocket.
This day was established to raise awareness about overdoses deaths. Our community has spent years doing just that: sounding the alarm on a crisis that has taken far too many. There are no words to describe the collective loss that has swallowed us whole. We have both mourned and raged together because we know that every single death was preventable. But grief and anger will not solve the problems our community faces.
And therefore, together, we are committed to taking action.
In response to Maine shattering its annual record for overdose deaths, for the past two years we have been organizing our community, passing legislation, and promoting community-based solutions to this crisis. And we have no plans of slowing down.
This past spring, we convinced a bipartisan majority of both the Maine House and Senate to pass the strongest Good Samaritan law in the country. Sharing our stories and having them share theirs, we helped lawmakers see that if we want to stop overdose deaths, we have to prioritize saving lives over punishing people for minor crimes.
We also worked with lawmakers to add seats to the Maine Recovery Council to make sure that experts – people with lived experience – get a say in how the state spends the money from opioid lawsuit settlements. These wins come on the heels of last year’s successes: ending criminal penalties for people who possess syringes, fentanyl test strips, and other safer-use supplies and making sure that counties without recovery community centers are prioritized by the state.
In spite of the amazing work we’ve done, we know we still have a long way to go.
Every day, we field calls from people wanting treatment, and we have to tell them that Maine only has two detox centers – a total of 20 beds – available to people who are uninsured. For those who manage to get into detox or in-patient rehab, we know they will most likely be released with no safe place to go when they get out, jeopardizing their newfound recovery. We are also all too aware that the grassroots recovery community centers that do exist in Maine are operating on shoestring budgets and hopes and dreams.
We need an all-hands-on-deck approach: prevention efforts that center the voices of young people and the realities of drug use; harm reduction for those who still use drugs, including the protection and expansion of Narcan access in our communities; and treatment and other recovery supports for those who want them – including dramatically increasing the number of community-based detox and voluntary in-patient treatment options around the state.
Finally, we must end the criminalization of possession of substances for personal use. Last session, our Legislature was clear, in Maine we value saving lives over the ability to charge people with minor offenses. Substance use disorder is a disease. A symptom of that disease is the use of drugs. Arresting people for possessing drugs is arresting them for a symptom of their disorder.
As community organizers, our top priority is keeping people safe within systems that work against people who use drugs. We are more committed than ever to achieving our vision for a Maine in which everyone can easily access necessary care without stigma and we are calling on those who we elected to follow suit. A failure of our lawmakers to pass these life-saving strategies would be nothing short of a dereliction of duty.