Treat the addiction
We shake our heads and gnash our teeth with every tragic death from drugs. So why don’t we demand treatment? It’s not the cost of treatment because the benefit-to-cost ratio is so well established. And these aren’t strangers. These are our sons and daughters, our mothers, our fathers, our life-long friends. We want them well, happy and recovering, not jailed.
We know what works: no new miracle medications or expensive new produces are needed. And treatment does work: it saves lives and restores to us those we thought lost. If effective treatments for cancer or heart disease were to be withheld, we would not stand for it. We’d speak out and demand answers and action.
Needle exchange is important in preventing the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C, and naloxone is important in treating overdoses. But these are symptoms of the disease and have distracted the public and politicians from understanding the need to treat the disease with buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone, in conjunction with behavioral therapy. Buprenorphine and methadone are life-saving medications. They don’t substitute “one drug for another.” In this regard, wrong beliefs kill.
As of now, no addiction medicine specialists have been invited to Gov. Paul LePage’s drug summit. This is telling: there won’t be any discussion of evidence-based treatment of addiction. If we want to stop the epidemic, medication-assisted treatment must be the center of the state’s strategy.
Mark Publicker, M.D.
Past President
Northern New England Society of Addiction Medicine
Gorham
Dropping the A-bomb
Have the people who staged the ” die in” in Bangor on Thursday ever read about the horrors the Japanese army inflicted on civilians when they invaded a country?
When the Japanese went into China, they raped, tortured and killed anyone they felt like because they could. When they invaded the Philippines, they killed the inhabitants or made them slaves. On the Bataan Death March, soldiers were bayoneted and left beside the road when they could no longer walk.
So if you want to commemorate something, think about all the innocent people the Japanese army wiped out.
If President Harry S. Truman hadn’t dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would have been a lot more soldiers and civilians who would have been killed and tortured.
John L. Clark
Bangor
Clean elections
August marks the 50th anniversary of the federal Voting Rights Act, which was passed to make our democracy healthier and stronger. National leaders put aside their differences to give every American a voice by guaranteeing all Americans the right to vote free from discrimination.
Today, all Americans have the right to vote. Now the struggle and fight we face is ensuring that vote really matters. That’s why the clean elections ballot initiative — Question 1 on November’s ballot — is so important.
A 2010 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court gave way to unlimited and often times undisclosed amounts of money flowing into political campaigns in an effort to buy influence and sway elections. That influence is drowning out the voice of everyday voters and weakening our democracy.
The clean elections initiative will limit the influence of big money in our political system by strengthening clean elections, increasing transparency by toughening campaign disclosure laws and holding those who break our elections laws accountable by increasing fines and penalties.
This November, let’s reclaim our democracy and make it once again truly of, by and for the people by voting yes on Question 1.
Angelica Loredo
Bangor
Preposterous ‘Deflategate’
If two quarterbacks have footballs inflated to the level best for each, then neither has an advantage over the other. Can we agree to that logic? The preposterous ” Deflategate” mess arises from the ridiculous rule about inflation pressure.
Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers has stated he likes the balls highly inflated. Tom Brady has told everybody he likes them low. So if the Patriots’ footballs leave the 70-degree locker room and go out onto the 40-degree field and are used, might there not be a couple that by halftime had fallen below the “legal” level?
Much false information put out by the NFL is coming to light. There were only a few underinflated balls, and not down as much as first stated.
No one cared about this before. The worst fine for under- or over-inflated balls was $25,000. Certainly not $1 million and two draft picks for the Patriots and a four game suspension for Brady. This is a vendetta arising from jealousies over the Patriots’ excellence.
Brady has said he never asked for balls to be underinflated. I believe him. He was drafted number 199 in the sixth round and has always been out to prove that he can do it himself. This is not a person who looks for dishonest means to win.
And in the second half, with reinflated footballs, Brady and the Patriots cleaned the Colts’ clock.
Abbott Meader
Oakland
Nuclear horror
In August 1945, I was a pilot in Maine Fighter Squadron 323 stationed on Okinawa. The island was “secure” after a savage battle for the island. Our final mission was to “soften up” Japan for the attack on the home islands.
On Aug. 6, in the midst of the invasion plans, we heard of a new weapon. An atomic bomb had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, and then three days later another was dropped on Nagasaki.
Japan surrendered Aug. 15, and the war officially ended Sept. 2.
No more combat air patrols, no more bomber missions to Kyushu and Japanese-held Formosa. The realization that the war was over finally sank in.
The last entry into my flight log book was Aug. 23, 1945. On the day, 24 Corsairs made a valedictory flight to Yokosuka. Our bomb racks and machine guns were empty.
When we reached the mainland, our squadron leader had one word: “Hiroshima!” We spread our formation and looked ahead. There was where a city used to be, a dirty black smudge on the otherwise green and brown landscape. A graveyard without tombstones.
The industrial city had been incinerated by “Little Boy.” Three days later, “Fat Man” destroyed Nagasaki.
Today, their killer progeny have been “kept in the box,” so to speak, despite dangerous saber-rattling. Pray we keep it so, lest we blow this world of ours to kingdom come.
Paul A. Lucey
Veazie