Maine municipalities embrace red tape while their people die

Editor,

Maine municipalities are desperately trying to fit one solution to the opioid crisis – affordable and accessible recovery houses – into their outdated code books. They are putting entire communities at risk by not expeditiously reconciling their code books with federal law, with sound logic, and with an approach that will save lives and taxpayers’ money.

In December of 2016, I invested $4,000 of my own money to start Journey House, an organization that provides low-cost, low-barrier, and evidence-based recovery-oriented housing to Mainers seeking recovery from Substance Use Disorder (SUD).

In eight short months, with my partner Eric Skillings and our team, Journey House tripled in size and quadrupled in capacity. We opened a second recovery house for men, and then we opened a third house- the first recovery house for women in York County. We also just opened another recovery house in Lewiston – the first such house in Androscoggin County.

In the hospitality industry, a “bed night” is a measure of occupancy for one person for one night. In the field of addiction recovery, I would like to propose the “recovery bed night,” and define it as a day and a night of recovery-oriented housing, structure, and peer support. Starting with only a $4,000 investment, we were able to offer a total of 3,720 recovery bed nights in 2017.

Our total expenses for these 3,720 recovery bed nights amounted to $49,075 (including $27,869 on rent, $6,465 on utilities, and $1,947 on drug tests). That’s $13/day to provide a person with a genuine opportunity at recovery, and their community an opportunity to heal. Compare that to the over $100/day that taxpayers pay to keep a person in jail because there are not enough programs like ours.

Why should nonviolent people with Substance Use Disorder- our children, siblings, parents, our friends and our neighbors- languish in jail at a high expense to taxpayers, when they could instead be offered recovery-oriented housing, structure, and peer support? The best part is that organizations like Journey House are entirely self-sustaining.

They do not drain local resources. Residents pay their own way, work jobs, contribute to their local economy, and pay taxes. Incarcerating these people does the opposite for the taxpayer- it costs eight times as much and destroys communities.

When the individual starts to recover,their community starts to recover as well.

Recovery-oriented housing is an evidence-based and highly cost-effective practice, one of the lowest-hanging fruits in the fight against addiction. Why, then, has my organization encountered so much resistance? Why is there an eagerness among overzealous municipal and state officials to embrace illegal and counterproductive red tape? Why do they resist change and cling to the lethal status quo? Sadly, for 18 months, countless public officials have refused to treat Journey House residents as they would treat other people. At least one public official made threats to shut down Journey House, an act that would not have had any merit and that would have been a violation of federal and Maine state law.

It was partly due to this alarming hostility, this “contempt prior to investigation,” that we had to close our Biddeford location. People use the word “stigma” a lot, but what does it really mean? Well, the final product of stigma is discrimination. As long as public officials in Maine remain complicit in discriminating against people seeking recovery from SUD, we will keep losing friends and family to this treatable condition.

No fewer than four Maine municipalities have taken hostile approaches to what it is we are trying to do. Illegal restrictions like limiting occupancy to four unrelated people in a building- even when it has five bedrooms- undoubtedly contributes to the death toll. When we cite the federal laws that instruct municipalities to allow our residents to cohabitate, it falls on deaf ears until we have lawyers in the room. If you are homeless and have a Substance Use Disorder in Maine, you better have a lawyer if you want to get off the streets. No, that is not overly reductive- that is the reality that we see every day out here.

This is a systemic problem in Maine. Unfortunately most legal aid agencies have not wanted to represent my residents because they are “more comfortable going after bad landlords” than they are going against municipalities. As a result, it’s the hyper-marginalized and poor among us who suffer, while public administrators, entrenched nonprofits and other status-quoers sit in their ivory towers of inefficient and often counterproductive addiction recovery policy.

In this battle against stigma and marginalization, if you are interested in seeing lives saved, taxpayer money saved, and quality of life improved for all, I urge you to demand competence from your elected officials. Call or email them and tell them to uphold and expand individuals’ rights to recovery-oriented housing. #peopleDOrecover in #recoveryreadycommunities.

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