“I’ve driven people all the way to Wellspring in Bangor from Portland to get people into treatment. “When one in eight people with an opioid addiction are able to get treatment, that tells us something,” he said. What the state needs to combat them all is expanded mental health care and substance use treatment facilities that address the root causes behind drug use. Though xylazine is a new threat to Mainers who use drugs, Burns said there will always be new and increasingly harmful illicit street drugs. Janet Mill’s fifth annual Opioid Response Summit, she announced two initiatives added to her Opioid Response Plan, one of which provides $1 million to purchase and distribute xylazine test strips across the state. “It has become a routine part of police work, which is crazy.”ĭuring Gov. “Because our officers are often first on the scene, our officers are using Narcan over once a week to respond to overdoses,” he said. This is because xylazine is usually mixed with an opioid, like fentanyl, that will respond to Narcan. The CDC, however, still recommends Narcan be administered in any suspected drug overdose. Xylazine is particularly dangerous because it’s not an opioid, which means it doesn’t respond to Narcan, a nasal spray that can reverse the effects of an overdose. Xylazine was first detected in Maine in 2021. states, and the administration’s laboratory system reported that about 23 percent of fentanyl powder and 7 percent of fentanyl pills seized by the DEA in 2022 contained xylazine. The DEA has seized xylazine and fentanyl mixtures in all but two U.S. “There’s very little actual heroin around these days.” “Given how murky the supply is, by the time things get to Maine, no one knows what’s in it,” said William Burns of the Portland Police Department’s Behavioral Health Unit. Traffickers can buy the drug from foreign distributors or veterinary pharmaceutical companies, and this practice is happening more because xylazine is cheap and causes long-lasting psychoactive effects. In an October 2022 report, the DEA stated people usually unknowingly inject or ingest xylazine when it’s mixed into other illicit drugs. The latest sinister street drug harming Mainers with substance use disorder could increase the state’s fatal overdose rate that has only risen in recent years, but a member of the Portland Police Department’s Behavioral Health Unit said expanding access to substance use and mental health care may be the key to breaking the cycle.
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