Health care and legal advocates enthusiastically supported a bill to require Maine’s Commissioner of Corrections to establish a substance use disorder treatment program in Maine correctional facilities at a public hearing on Friday, a change they say will help curb the number of lives lost to the opioid crisis.
Although sponsor Sen. Linda Sanborn (D-Cumberland) requested the bill, LD 1096, be tabled during the hearing—referencing an executive order from the Mills administration that plans to expand medication-assisted treatment (MAT) to Maine’s correctional facilities—advocates testified in favor of making the requirement a law as well.
“I come here, today, as a person of faith to ask you to send a message,” said Peter Lehman, a professional criminologist living in Thomaston and member of the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, at a public hearing for the bill on Friday. “To send a message that addiction is a health problem, and to send a message that those struggling with drug use are human beings that have the same inherent worth and dignity [as] all of us, as children of God, even when they are incarcerated.”
Peter Michaud, general counselor for the Maine Medical Association, described MAT as “the gold standard for treating substance use disorder.”
“The time of release from incarceration is one of the highest risk times for opioid overdose,” he said. “They come out, they relapse, and they may have been taking a fairly high level of opioids before they went in, and they can’t really figure out what’s the appropriate dose now that [they’ve] been off it for so long. They end up taking too much, and they overdose. They die.”
With MAT, he added, treatment would continue uninterrupted through a person’s time in a correction facility and beyond.
“Today, in most jails, prisoners with comorbid substance use and mental illnesses are left undiagnosed and without medication,” said Arthur Adoff, an alcohol and drug counselor who has been in recovery for two decades. “This is indicative of our system which treats people who use drugs as unfit and undeserving of medical treatment.”
A federal judge sided in March with an argument made by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine that denying inmates access to MAT for substance-use disorder is in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), setting a precedent for prisoners’ right to treatment.
(Photo: Thomas Hawk | Creative Commons via Flickr)
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