Recovery coaches push for harm reduction center pilot program

Marion Anderson’s motive to assist a hurt discount heart in Maine is easy.

“I’m bored with my associates dying,” she stated Monday.

Anderson and others spoke on the State Home in assist of LD 1159, which might create a pilot program to open a hurt discount well being heart.

Hurt discount facilities present secure indoor areas for folks to make use of medication, obtain counseling and get well being service referrals. The laws directs the Maine Division of Well being and Human Providers to create a 2-year pilot mission to open a middle.

It doesn’t specify the place the middle can be positioned however says {that a} metropolis or city’s governing physique must vote to permit one to open.

The laws comes as Maine continues to grapple with an growing variety of overdose deaths. An estimated 716 Mainers died of an overdose in 2022, the third straight record-setting yr.

“People are dying alone within the loos of Dunkin’ Donuts,” stated Anderson, who has labored as a restoration coach at a syringe trade and in peer assist. “Folks don’t have entry to secure provide, or secure areas or detox, hospitals. There’s so many boundaries in place.”

Knowledge distributed by the Maine Restoration Advocacy Mission reveals that there are greater than 120 hurt discount facilities the world over and that there has by no means been a deadly overdose at any of them.

The Maine laws describes the brand new heart as “a community-based useful resource heart providing well being screening, illness prevention and restoration help providers the place an individual could safely use beforehand obtained managed substances.”

Chasity Tuell of Maine Entry Factors, which gives syringes, overdose prevention training and the overdose reversing drug naloxone, stated the facilities could possibly be particularly important in bigger cities.

“ our larger cities that have already got homeless encampments it is a excellent place for folks to collect and we’ll now not see or hear in regards to the discarded syringes that Bangor particularly appears to be grappling with,” she stated. “It’s giving folks revolutionary methods to really meet folks the place they’re at.”

Tuell stated funding for the pilot program may come from the Maine Restoration Council, a board that may distribute hundreds of thousands in opioid settlement funds.

Mikki Rice, director of well being training at Maine Entry Factors, stated the facilities do greater than stop overdoses.

“Extra individuals are proven to enter into therapy after they attend facilities like this,” she stated. “They’ll actually be a spot for any person to seek out group.”

The Legislature’s Well being and Human Providers Committee was scheduled to take testimony on the invoice Monday afternoon, with a piece session to comply with within the coming weeks.