Answer Addiction

Tag: Maine

  • Maine's First Female Governor Targets Opioids

    Maine's First Female Governor Targets Opioids

    Governor Janet Mills is making the opioid epidemic in her state her top priority.

    Democratic Governor Janet Mills is making the opioid crisis in her state her top priority. Going the complete opposite direction of her predecessor, she has expanded Medicaid and made plans to appoint an opioid czar in her first days in office.

    Her Medicaid expansion would allow thousands of additional Maine citizens into the program, including those who need assistance in fighting opioid addictions.

    “A major part of the health care crisis is the opioid epidemic,” Governor Mills said in her inaugural address. To combat the epidemic in Maine, Mills said on Twitter she wants to appoint a czar to “marshal the collective power and resources of state government,” hoping to prevent deaths such as the 418 overdose deaths in Maine last year.

    Mills’ predecessor, former Republican Governor Paul LePage, was not constructive in approaching the drug crisis, suggesting the problem had something to do with race. In August 2016, LePage claimed he had a binder that showed a massive majority of busted drug dealers were black or Hispanic. 

    “I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come,” LePage said. “And I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn.”

    An audit of the binder revealed roughly half of the offenders in the binder appeared to be white. After being accused of being a racist, LePage denied the charges and claimed he was just stating facts.

    “You’ve been in uniform? You shoot at the enemy,” he once said at a statehouse press conference. “You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”

    Treatment advocates have high hopes for Mills’ plan.

    Gust Stringos is the medical director of a family practice in Skowhegan, a small town in Maine with a population of 8,000. He said half of his patients are battling opioid addiction.

    “Many of them were on Medicaid and then lost it in the era of LePage,” he said.

    He recalls one 21-year-old female who relapsed after losing coverage and dropping out of the treatment program. When she got pregnant, she requalified and was readmitted.

    “If she had been able to stay on Medicaid in the first place, she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant and wouldn’t have relapsed,” said Stringos. “That’s a typical story of people losing insurance and what happens.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Restaurant That Sedated Lobsters With Weed Under Investigation

    Restaurant That Sedated Lobsters With Weed Under Investigation

    “I feel bad that when lobsters come here there is no exit strategy,” said the owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound.

    Would you like your lobster baked or stoned?

    A beloved eatery in Maine is drawing attention—from national press as well as from state investigators—for smoking up its crustaceans with cannabis before boiling them as part of a questionably effective effort to soothe the lobsters’ last moments. 

    “I feel bad that when lobsters come here there is no exit strategy,” Charlotte Gill, owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound, told the Portland Press Herald. “It’s a unique place and you get to do such unique things but at the expense of this little creature. I’ve really been trying to figure out how to make it better.”

    Of course, it’s not even clear how much lobsters can feel pain or if they can actually get high, and the whole endeavor raises some nagging legal—and scientific—questions.

    “I’m not aware of any actual studies on this and haven’t done any myself, though it sounds interesting,” Robert Bayer, director of the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute, told the Maine paper. “When you put them in boiling water, the primitive nervous system that does exist is destroyed so quickly they’re unlikely to feel anything at all.”

    But, earlier this year, Switzerland banned boiling lobsters in light of studies suggesting the pinchy shellfish might feel some pain. New Zealand nixed the practice almost two decades ago. 

    Gill is a licensed marijuana grower, so she’s been cultivating the crustaceans’ cannabis at home, according to the New York Times. But that effort raised red flags with the state health department, prompting regulators to send her a notice politely pointing out that the marijuana is supposed to be grown for her, not for her lobsters.

    At the same time, the Maine Health Inspection Program has launched an investigation into the Southwest Harbor restaurant and its “high-end lobster,” but as of Friday they hadn’t issued any findings.

    Despite the catchy name and the smoky additive, Gill offered reassurances that the plant’s active ingredient wouldn’t actually make it through to human consumers, after the animals are cooked. 

    “THC breaks down completely by 392 degrees,” she said, “therefore we will use both steam as well as a heat process that will expose the meat to a 420 degree extended temperature, in order to ensure there is no possibility of carryover effect.”

    View the original article at thefix.com