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We understand lawmakers’ reluctance to endorse safe consumption sites, places where people can go to safely use substances, including those that are currently illegal. We were uncomfortable with them as well.
However, as it has become increasingly clear — as evidenced by the increasing number of overdose deaths each year — that what we as a state are doing to help those with substance use disorder hasn’t been enough, it has also become clear that no option, including uncomfortable ones, should be dismissed out of hand.
A bill, sponsored by Rep. Grayson Lookner, D-Portland, would have allowed cities and towns to approve sites where people could use heroin and other substances under the supervision of medical staff who could revive them if they overdose.
That version of the bill came very close to passage in the Maine Legislature. It passed the House earlier this month, but fell just two votes short of passage in the Senate. The measure was opposed by the governor’s office. Rather than allow the bill to be rejected outright and its intent to fade away, senators and later House members both advanced a different version of it to call for a commission to study the facilities, also called harm reduction health centers.
This would still be an important step forward. Done right (and with open minds), such a study can offer a thorough assessment of the pros and cons of safe consumption sites, which are opening in other states. It can also help Maine avoid mistakes that may have been made elsewhere, and address concerns about conflicts with federal law.
Support for a study also shows that lawmakers, even those who are skeptical, are willing to learn more about alternatives to policies that are failing to stem the deadly toll of Maine’s opioid epidemic.
Sites in other countries have been shown to reduce overdose mortality, drug use and infectious diseases among those who use them, and they can also link people with opioid addiction to treatment. However, they are in legal limbo here despite President Joe Biden’s administration signaling last year that it might be open to their operation despite laws against them.
The first sites in the U.S. opened in New York City in late 2021 and Rhode Island became the first state to authorize them that year. The federal government recently funded a study of the New York and Rhode Island facilities, but that review has yet to begin.
This debate is not happening in a vacuum. Last year, 716 people died of overdoses in Maine, with more than three-quarters of the deaths attributed to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. It was the third consecutive year that the state set a grim record for overdose deaths. The largest number of deaths were in Cumberland and Penobscot counties.
There was a glimmer of good news earlier this month as there was a slight drop in the number of overdose deaths in Maine in the first quarter of 2023 compared with last year. In the first four months of this year, 201 people died of overdoses, compared with 215 during the same time period last year.
While the state’s investments in expanded treatment and access to naloxone, an overdose-reversing drug, are helpful and to be commended, as long as so many Mainers are dying from overdoses, other options, like harm reduction health centers, can’t be taken off the table.
Rep. Lucas Lanigan, R-Sanford, in a powerful recent floor speech, shared his own heartbreaking experience with addiction to explain why he supports harm reduction health centers. “I used to believe that addiction was a personal choice and that anyone who was addicted should just stop using drugs. I believed that harm reduction was enabling people to use drugs.”
“I was wrong,” he said. Lanigan said he learned he was wrong when his then 19-year-old son nearly died of an overdose in his home on Christmas Eve a few years ago. He and his wife were able to reverse the overdose with naloxone. After receiving mental health and treatment services, his son has been sober for seven months, works a full-time job and pays taxes, Lanigan said.
“Addiction is something that we need multiple tools to come to a solution and today’s bill is one of those tools,” he said.
We’d echo that sentiment. As we wrote earlier this year: “We don’t have all the answers. Addressing opioid deaths is incredibly complicated, but we know this much to be true: Across the state, we cannot let our own discomfort stand in the way of saving lives.”
That remains true today. More fully considering harm reduction health centers, with an eye toward making them work in Maine, is one more way the state and communities can help turn the deadly tide of Maine’s opioid epidemic.
