Why Portland, Maine Is Currently Exhibit A in How Austerity Can Make America's Opioid Crisis Even Worse

People across the country have heard of Maine’s far-right governor Paul LePage, who openly uses racist epithets to dehumanize and scapegoat African Americans and just vetoed a bill to expand access to the proven drug overdose antidote Naloxone, stating that it "does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose.”

Lesser known is that Maine's supposedly progressive city of Portland is on the verge of compounding the LePage-wrought human rights disaster by potentially shuttering the India Street Public Health Center, the city's only public clinic that provides overdose antidote prescriptions, sexually transmitted infection testing, a needle-exchange program and an HIV positive primary health care clinic that even the local government acknowledges has a stellar track record....
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/why-portland-maine-currently-exhibit-how-govt-ignorance-and-austerity-can-make-americas-opioid