FREEPORT

On the day in which the State Legislature voted to override Gov. Paul LePage’s veto of a bill that would have provided greater access to the drug known as Narcan, U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told the crowd at the Freeport Hilton Garden Inn that opioids are the greatest epidemic threat he has seen to this state.

“Twenty people have died in the United States since you started this meeting — five people an hour, that’s the handy number,” King told the Maine Association of Psychiatric Physicians on Friday.

He said in Maine it’s almost one a day on average.

The battle against the opioid epidemic requires “all hands on deck,” said King, who referred to it as a “scourge” that nobody expected would get a foothold in Maine.

“If this were Ebola, you know where one person in the whole country died — it’s amazing if you think about it,” King, regarding the indifference shown toward opioid addiction.

King said the drug is killing 47,000 people a year, but the problem keeps being deferred.

King said about a month ago the legislature passed the Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act. He said the bill included treatment, prevention, and education — everything but the money to make it work.

King said that he, along with fellow Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, and others tried to pass an emergency funding amendment in the amount of $600 million for the bill, the amendment failed on a party-line vote.

King said he was beside himself, because just months prior, tax cuts in the amount of $680 billion were voted on and passed.

“A thousand times more — not a peep!” King exclaimed, emphasizing how a bill to stem the tide of nearly 50,000 deaths a year was so easily defeated, “It’s horrible and wrong and misplaced priorities.”

King said that’s where the role of the medical community comes in. He said that, according to White House statistics, four out of five new heroin addicts start with prescription drugs.

King said he’s often talked to people who have gone in for routine surgery and on the way out the door are given 30 or 60 Oxycodone or Oxycontin with little caution as standard practice.

“I want to communicate to you as physicians, the government doesn’t want to tell you how to do your job but unless you start thinking about the consequences, somebody’s going to — public policy is going to intervene here,” King said.

King said law enforcement and border security needs to play a roll as well.

“Our intelligence community knows when there is shipments leaving South America, heading for the U.S. and we don’t have enough ships and people to interdict them,” King said, noting that’s a serious failure on our country’s part.

King turned to the medical community asking them to come up with creative solutions of what works. He said his job is to try to pass the laws but he needs input from the medical community to stem what he called “slow motion suicide” of our youth.

“The most valuable commodity in my business are ideas and you need to tell us what you think,” King said.

King said LePage’s stance on Narcan is one of moral hazard. He said it is well possible that someone will take the presence of Narcan as an enabling safety net before using heroin but in his conversations with first responders, the bottom line is lives saved.

“One of the realities of this disease is it takes multiple trips through the treatment process to finally get well. That means, it may take three or four overdoses and Narcan injections but if that gets you to a place where your life is saved, I think that makes sense,” King said.

King said that although he understands the governor’s concerns, for him it is literally about saving lives.

dmcintire@timesrecord.com