Municipal officials hear gritty details of Maine’s drug crisis As part of the Maine Municipal Association's annual convention, front-line responders spoke about what they see daily and what
“Yesterday, we had a fellow that we saw three times in a six-hour period,” he said. “Every time, he re-dosed himself in terms of heroin. The third time he was given an option — go the to the hospital or go to jail, because we were going to chase this guy forever. There are no easy answers.” Not all overdoses result in deaths, but the death toll from opioids is rising. In 2016, 376 drug-induced deaths were reported statewide, according to the Expanded Maine Drug Death Report for 2016, funded by the Office of the Maine Attorney General and compiled by Marcella Sorg, of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. That number is a 38 percent increase over the deaths reported in 2015.
they hope can be done. BY JESSICA LOWELLSTAFF WRITER
For more than an hour, Walsh and Lt. John Kilbride, of the Falmouth Police Department, spoke to about 65 municipal and law enforcement leaders at a session of the Maine Municipal Association’s annual convention about the state’s opioid crisis about what they see every day. A number of those officials had addiction stories of their own to tell of friends and family members who have become addicted to heroin, fentanyl and carfentanyl. Walsh said when he first starting working in Portland in 1977, he and his co-workers encountered heroin occasionally. Now he and his team know that when they come on shift, it’s not if but how many overdoses they will see that day, in front of schools, on Interstate 295, in homes and on the street.
AUGUSTA —The people on the front lines of the response to Maine’s opioid crisis are doing everything they can when they’re confronted addicts and overdoses, but it’s not always enough for the addicts, their families or even their co-workers. “I keep thinking it’s going to get better, because how could it get any worse? But it is. It is getting worse,”Terry Walsh, deputy chief of the Portland Fire Department, saidWednesday.
Of the deaths in 2016, 88 percent were accidental overdoses. Most deaths were caused by two or more drugs, and two-thirds of all deaths were caused by nonpharmaceutical opioids.
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