FARMINGTON – The state’s Director of Opioid Response was at Thursday’s Farmington Rotary Club meeting to outline recent state initiatives aimed at combating the ongoing drug epidemic.
Gordon Smith, a lawyer that has been associated with the Maine Medical Association since 1981, was appointed to his current position in late January. An Executive Order issued by Governor Janet Mills was issued in February, putting into place a number of initiatives designed to impact a drug epidemic that killed more than 1,600 people over the previous five years. While those numbers were now beginning to come back down, Smith said, the state continued to deal with related issues, including babies born to mothers misusing opioids.
“It’s a very complicated problem and it’s had a tremendous impact on everybody,” Smith said.
The growth of the opioid epidemic over the past several years, as well as its impact on middle class families in Maine, had vaulted the issue to the forefront, Smith said. He noted that he used to ask audiences if they knew anyone that had been impacted by opioid abuse. Now, he said he didn’t bother: everyone does.
“There’s no aspect of Maine that hasn’t been hit by this,” Smith said. One example he provided is the truck driving industry; companies were having trouble hiring drivers that could pass a drug test.
One major effort is trying to lower the stigma associated with opioid abuse, Smith said. Nationally, only two in 10 people seek treatment for substance abuse issues; treating opioid abuse as a chronic illness helped lower barriers for people that could go into recovery programs.
Similarly, Smith said that 35,000 doses of Naloxone, or Narcan, a drug that can counter the effect of an opioid overdose, had been distributed across the state, including to 82 police departments. More than 800 successful revivals had been documented, Smith said.
“We can’t get people into recovery if they’re dead,” Smith said.
Efforts to improve the chances of people going into recovery include hiring 250 recovery coaches, trying to make Suboxone facilities more available to people – studies show that people on Suboxone had a higher chance of successfully recovering – and providing medication for people in the prison system. The state also needed more recovery centers and housing, Smith said.
The state is also seeking to expand syringe exchange sites with local support. Those sites were important for multiple reasons, Smith said: dirty syringes could spread diseases which resulted in massive healthcare costs, but the exchanges also put people in contact with healthcare professionals that could act as a bridge to recovery programs.
