The opioid epidemic has ripped through Maine, taking thousands of lives in only a few years. These people were our co-workers, our neighbors, our family, and our friends. Despite our nearly universal experience with these tragedies, we are still told that drug use is a problem of morality, and is punished as such. Even the risk of incarceration can be fatal, discouraging people at the scene of an overdose from calling emergency services for fear of arrest. One way to reverse the oppression of retributive drug-policy and save lives is to expand Maine’s Good Samaritan Law.

Currently, law enforcement can incarcerate people who call for help at the scene of an overdose, which does nothing to keep people from using. Expanding the Good Samaritan Law to protect those who are saving lives is a step in the direction of healing and solidarity by protecting Mainers when they save a loved one.

Our prisons are filled with working class Mainers convicted of low-level drug charges, but they did not create this problem. Criminalization dooms many of them to an unending cycle of poverty-wages and reincarceration. We cannot accept the targeting of working Mainers for a crisis they did not start while drug companies and the carceral system profit off of their misery.

Nothing we do can bring back those we have lost. The question is, now, how to move forward. We must demand that our elected officials support the Good Samaritan Bill, LD 1862, to protect people who call for help.

Ryan Schmitz
Portland