Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey and Rep. Michele Meyer (D-Maine) announced a $1 million investment of opioid settlement funds on Wednesday for a social services hub in Kittery.
[RELATED: Maine AG’s Office Quietly Spends Millions on Opioid Settlement Funds with Limited Disclosure…]
The funding will go to Mainspring: The Seacoast Social Services Collective, a project led by Fair Tide, an organization aimed at ending homelessness, and Footprints, a food pantry.
Mainspring describes itself as a collective of nonprofits, with centralized data sharing, case management, and other forms of cooperation. It provides a single building where people seeking a variety of services can go all in one location.
Services include housing assistance, food, energy assistance, aging care, addiction recovery, education, and a Maine Department of Labor Career Center to assist people searching for employment.
“People struggling with substance use disorder are often simultaneously facing housing instability, food insecurity, poverty, and other barriers to care. By bringing services together in one accessible location and coordinating support across agencies, Mainspring is helping people access the resources they need to achieve long-term stability and recovery. I am proud to support this work through Maine’s opioid settlement funds,” said Frey in a press release.
Opioid settlement funds are drawn from legal settlements with opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies and can only be used towards fighting drug addiction.
In a rarity for social service providers, Mainspring appears to avoid overt left-wing political statements and does not post about them on their active social media page; they did not even post anything regarding LGBTQ issues in June of last year.
Frey has previously come under fire for a lack of transparency in his use of opioid settlement funds.
Such BS .
Money given to another NGO who can turn around and donate most of it back to the Democrat party .
Thanks for NOTHING Frey .
YOU need to go find a different job . You are nobody’s hero except for Mills and Bellows .
Wonder how much will end up in someones pocket.
is there treatment without enablement
Good that this is about as far South in Maine as possible. After all, nothing attracts druggies like free stuff and they will swarm up from nearby states to suck down the freebies. If we are lucky, they will not catch wind of the other Maine “non profits” offering similar free stuff and come North with warming weather.
Well now. Up jumped the price of poker. pssst. Hey, bub…your beat. Now step away from the table nice like.
Wrap around services first came into being to support psychiatric patients who could not manage their own affairs. The prerequisite was obviously a medical diagnosis with prescribed medication. Substance abuse is characterized not only by addiction but is known to cause thought disorder. Step One of Alcoholics Anonymous declares thet our lives ” had become unmanageable.” Yet, in the instance of this NGO and also of governmental thinking in general, there is no treatment plan required as the precursor of substance abuse support services. One million may go to active users who will no doubt remain using while receiving the type of comforting assistance which enables it.
Why is recovery never the primary goal of government funded programs? It is as if the clients have been written off as a lost cause.
If there is no priority given to sobriety, why not provide this population with assistance from mainstream programs for the disabled? Such programs exist and are already funded. To the contrary, how many addicts could become productive members off society, leading fulfilling lives, as the result of a million dollar program of recovery? Wrap around programs were never intended to support untreated drug addicts and alcoholics. Those services treat only the side effects of substance use,a fact surely known to the bureaucrats who dole out the funds. It’s time for a new approach – perhaps it will come under a more informed state administration
Another piggy bank for Communist Democrats to defraud !