Race Isn’t The Reason For Maine’s Heroin Crisis. But Politics Sure as Hell Is.

Paul LePage’s racist comments are masking the very real failures of the war on drugs.

Paul LePage is the governor of Maine. He is also, as you may have learned over the past few days, a racist.

The fire was stoked by LePage’s racialized and sexualized gibberish—in which he came up just short from declaring that Maine’s heroin epidemic is not only leading to tragedies like overpopulated prisons and fatal overdoses, but to a phenomenon he seemed to find equally disquieting: interracial procreation. And it was fanned by just about every major news outlet, as well as Hillary Clinton, who condemned his “racist rants.”

But the conflagration has already been reduced to embers.

So it goes in America’s news cycle: We reprimand the bigot, professing shock at comments that never actually shocked so much as reinforced our preconceptions about such figures. LePage, after all, is a Tea Party Republican with a history of imbecilic outbursts; when he offered a quasi-apology as twisted as his original offense, it gave us one last opportunity to roll our eyes in moral superiority before moving on.

And so, in just 72 hours both LePage’s remarks and the ensuing scolding have eclipsed the very story they should be illuminating: namely, the stubborn and sustained refusal of the hard right to understand the failure of the War on Drugs.

Back in 2014, I spent months reporting for Rolling Stone on the heroin crisis in neighboring Vermont. The situation there is more or less identical to Maine’s: both states present—from a dealer’s point of view— uniquely enticing opportunities. Throughout the 2000s there was a nationwide rash of abuse of pharmaceutical opiates, notably OxyContin, which was especially pronounced in rural areas where overworked doctors serving Medicare-reliant populations took to prescribing opiates as a quick-fix panacea.

State and federal governments responded by enforcing more strident prescription guidelines, and pressuring the drug’s makers to reformulate it so it couldn’t be snorted or injected.

The trouble was that this didn’t account for the void it created: opiate addicts deprived of their fix, who represented a new market for heroin sales. Given New England’s proximity to New York, the Northeast’s main distribution hub for heroin, it was no surprise that dealers from the city began traveling north, where they can charge up to three times the price and conduct their business in places where law enforcement is scant.

Heroin use has been on the rise just about everywhere in the United States, but in states like Maine and Vermont — where homogenous populations are spread throughout pastoral towns — you see its effects in stark, undiluted focus.

While I was interviewing a recovering addict inside a Burlington Starbucks, for instance, he casually pointed out that the two people sitting next to us who were conducting a deal. Spending an evening with undercover cops driving through seemingly bucolic streets, they described the open air drug market the neighborhood had become. I may as well have been in an episode of The Wire. Given that some $2 million of heroin was being trafficked into Vermont each week, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see rehab clinics getting more foot traffic than farmers’ markets.

Where Vermont and Maine differ, though, is in their approach to the issue. Vermont’s governor, Peter Shumlin, is a progressive Democrat who has become the national face of a more compassionate and nuanced outlook, treating drug addiction as a medical, rather than criminal, problem. Instead of shuffling petty users into the unforgiving claws of the criminal justice system, Shumlin has been expanding Vermont’s treatment facilities while using law enforcement to focus on disrupting the major suppliers.

“The theory has been that if we just arrest users and put them away, then we’re going to make progress,” Shumlin told me. “Public policymakers have refused to say not only that this has failed, but that it’s failing miserably.”

It will take years to be able to gauge the results — Vermont, like the nation at large, continued to experience a rise in deaths from overdoses in 2015 — but the effort to change the culture has been applauded. Eric Holder, as attorney general, deemed heroin an “urgent public health crisis” when he called for reducing mandatory minimums for minor drug charges in 2014. Last fall, Hillary Clinton used her current Presidential bid to introduce a plan for that would direct funds currently used for mass incarceration toward treating addiction. “Plain and simple, drug and alcohol addiction is a disease, not a moral failing — and we must treat it as such,” she wrote in an op-ed for the New Hampshire Union Leader.

On the other end of the spectrum you have an entrenched stalwart like LePage, who seems to not have gotten the memo that the War on Drugs, now in its fourth decade, has been a steady history of repeated defeat at staggering costs. When Shumlin was introducing his approach in 2014, LePage asked for increasing law enforcement presence to “hunt down dealers and get them off the street.” And although 200 people died from overdoses in Maine in 2015, LePage recently threatened to veto a prospective drug fighting bill that he believed showed “favoritism” to rehab.

Spend time among heroin users and you quickly realize the absurdity of this. In Vermont, I sat inside a chain restaurant with a longtime addict who hadn’t shot up in a few hours.

He was poised, polite, and funny — hardly the stereotype of the nodding-off junkie. He sat there, voicing what was taking place inside his body.

“Getting antsy,” he said. “Getting tense. A kind of sick feeling. Like, I’ll start throwing up if I don’t get some.”

This is how heroin users talk. They turn to the drug not to “get high” but to “get well,” the long term dangers masked by a quest for short term relief. At the time, he wanted to quit, but couldn’t get a bed in a rehab center; he has since been accepted into one of Vermont’s new facilities, and remains sober.

So, as we condemn LePage for his racially-tinged idiocy, it’s worth remembering that his comments are a reflection of an equally antiquated and unfortunate drug policy. LePage, oddly, even admitted this himself in recent days. While trying to extricate himself from the mess he created, he noted that when he cracked down on the over-prescribing of pharmaceutical opiates he didn’t foresee that he was priming many of his most vulnerable constituents for heroin use.

Rather than point fingers at the D-Moneys and Shifties of this world, in other words, he may want to take a look in the mirror.