Maine’s Future in Peril Former National Drug Policy Official Warns Lawyers Group

With over 10,000 overdoses last year alone and fatalities — many of them adolescents — ranging from 40 to 70 a month, Maine is facing an existential crisis of drug abuse, Robert “Bobby” Charles told a group of lawyers in Portland on Tuesday. Unless urgent, comprehensive action is taken soon, this trend threatens greater damage to the rising generation than the Vietnam War did to his own, Charles warned.

A native of Wayne, Charles served as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement under President George W. Bush and had previously worked in the White House as an aide to presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, who famously declared a War on Drugs in the 1980s. As an attorney who had clerked for a federal judge for the Ninth Circuit and served as a senior staffer for U.S. House of Representatives leadership on drug policy, the Federalist Society of Maine invited Charles to speak to its members on legal challenges his home state now faces.

“Today we are looking at threats entirely different in scale and scope than when I was growing up, when it would have been unimaginable that the Trinitarios (a Dominican-American gang) have now marked territory in every Maine county,” Charles said. Other gangs with ties to the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico’s most dangerous narco-trafficking groups, have also established footholds in the state, he added.

For emphasis, Charles noted that federal agents have recently seized a shipment of pure heroin in Lewiston, and the volume of Class 1 narcotics Maine is looking at now involve bricks of cocaine and enough fentanyl to kill every resident several times over.

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One addiction recovery group pegged the annual cost of drug and alcohol abuse in Maine at $1.4 billion combining health-care, criminal justice and lost productivity, though that might well be a conservative estimate. Broadly speaking, Charles said, there is an acceptance of this being the “new normal.”

Since 2019, a state-funded program has distributed more than 458,000 doses of Naloxone, or Narcan, which is administered to overdose victims.

“The problems is policy-makers today view this as the solution,” Charles pointed out, contrasting this with the need for a more systemic approach.

Considering the scale of the drug epidemic afflicting Maine, it is shocking that there are only 315 beds in treatment centers throughout the state, he said. A comprehensive remedy would involve multiple streams of activity ranging from working with the host countries where most narcotics are sourced — though this would have to be at the federal level — to interdiction, treatment and prevention.

“We can’t just address the supply side of the problem,” said Charles, who played a key role in drafting and implementing the Plan Colombia that the U.S. government developed in the early 2000s to stem the production and supply of cocaine from that Latin American nation.

A whole-of-state effort could make substantial progress in pushing back Maine’s tide of drug addiction in 24 months time, given sustained focus and committed leadership, Charles suggested. Instead of doubling down on a problem that’s killing off a generation, he observed, Maine’s attorney general is currently spending a good portion of his $12 million annual budget waging quixotic legal crusades in other states going after out-sized targets like “Big Oil” or challenging the federal government’s legal authorities.

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He also said it is impossible to ignore the correlation between worsening drug use and a more permissive attitude about narcotics that was ushered in simultaneous to the state’s adoption of medical and recreational marijuana legalization policies. Referencing the 300 illegal grow houses throughout the state operated by Chinese nationals on which The Maine Wire has extensively reported, Charles said Maine makes itself a “soft target” that attracts trans-national groups looking to exploit loopholes in state law and the cover offered by its rural character.

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Beyond drug policy alone, the state needs a radical re-think in how to better protect the rising generation from cycles of behavior that often lead to drug use.

“Maine has lost the script on how to educate our kids,” he said, referencing recent the NAEP scorecard that found that 70 percent of fourth graders can’t read. “We need to get back to basics.”

Modeling positive behavior and setting higher goals are missing from today’s equation, he suggested, adding that this is what is needed to get back to the kind of educational performance Maine showcased in 1992 when its schools were rated the best in the nation.

Charles says he regularly meets with members of the Maine legislature and other policy-makers to urge a more comprehensive approach to tackling the state’s drug epidemic.

A heckler who apparently objected to Federalist Society’s conservative principles interrupted the opening of the Tuesday speaking event in a downtown Portland restaurant by screaming at the attendees that they were all “oligarchs and a@&hole scumbags” before being escorted out of the private dining room.

Editors Note: Robert Charles is a regular op-ed contributor the The Maine Wire, which is always open to submissions from all Mainers with arguments and informed opinions on key policy questions.