Recent forum was held as part of Gov. LePage’s drug task force
The problem 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 TAMC.
“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 overdoses several a week and daily two or three drug seekers coming in to try to get narcotic pain pills,” Thyng said at a March 7 community forum in Presque Isle, held as part of the Governor’s drug task force.
A similar session was held earlier in the day in Fort Kent.
In 2015, drug overdose deaths in Maine increased 31 percent to 272, 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” and advocating for more mental health resources.
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,” Irwin said of Florida, where he spent more than 20 years in policing. “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, director of behavioral health services at Aroostook Mental Health Center, who is himself in long-term addiction recovery.
Currently, Aroostook Mental Health Center, which operates a recovery program on a farm in Limestone, provides the addiction treatment medications suboxone, naltrexone and vivitrol, as do some area doctors, 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. 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.”
