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Director's Corner

Director's Update

Kimberly A. Johnson, Director

 

What's New

We are pleased to have awarded the State Incentive Grant - One ME local awards, which will provide prevention programming and coalition building across almost all of Maine's counties. These grants began the first of January. Awardees will spend some time working with OSA staff to assess community needs and choose the most appropriate approach to address their local risk factors and enhance their local protective factors. We were happy to have received good applications from all over the state, and look forward to working with these new grantees.

We received the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention grant for which we applied last summer. These funds are helping county sheriffs and state police in five (Cumberland, Piscataquis, Somerset, Lincoln, and York) counties better enforce underage drinking laws. Training began in October. We have also worked with the Bureau of Liquor Enforcement and the Attorney General's Office to begin compliance checks for liquor outlets. These checks employ 18 - 20 year olds. While most teens get their liquor from an adult, many know of at least one store where they can purchase without an id. Compliance checks are an important tool in reducing underage access to alcohol.

This year we have several new publications available. First the MYDAUS survey report is completed and available in print or downloadable from the publications section of this website. While the data has been available for some time, we are pleased to have this analytical report finally completed. Our annual report, a document required by the legislature, is available in print and PDF formats. This document reports on significant events and progress over the prior year. In March we will have a report on adolescent substance abuse - progress and problems, and a cost report detailing the cost of substance abuse to Maine, which is based on a similar document created by the state of Washington. All of these new reports provide information on what we have done, where we are now, and suggest directions for future work for our office and for the state as a whole.

We are disappointed that because of difficulty in finding staff, the new adolescent residential rehabilitation program has not yet opened. The original start date was early October. That was delayed until January due to difficulty finding a location and appropriate staff. They now have a location secured, but have had difficulty locating a program manager. We are looking at opening as soon as staff is hired, sometime before the first of April.

The difficulty Phoenix House and other programs have had in hiring senior staff has led OSA management to put workforce development as our top priority in our strategic plan for the next two years. We will be working with the federal government, the Addiction Technology Transfer Center at Brown University, Maine institutions of higher education, our training contractors New England Institute for Addiction Studies and AdCare Education, and providers to expand the pool of employees and to prepare the current workforce for growth in to supervisory and management positions. Our goal is to create multiple paths into the field and a career ladder for those who choose to grow. Because our workforce survey showed that for 50% of the workforce, this is a second career, we will focus, at least in part, on drawing in mid-career people looking for a more meaningful line of work.

Finally, OSA is working diligently to stem the tide of opiate abuse. We worked closely with the medical examiner's office on the recently issued report on overdose deaths. We have also been in close contact with a group from Yale University led by Dr. Robert Heimer who are doing a naturalistic study of drug users in Portland and Washington County. We have reached out to the public health community for information and help in addressing the growth of opiate abuse. We believe that after six months of stumbling about in the dark, that we have a good picture of both what is being abused and what is causing overdose deaths.

We will be working in conjunction with the Maine Center for Public Health and the Maine Public Health Association to move forward a plan to reduce overdose deaths in Maine. A new report entitled "A Public Health Strategic Plan to Address Opiate Abuse and Overdose: A Report from the MCPH/MPHA/OSA Opiate Abuse and Overdose Project" is available in PDF and Word formats. This report outlines a plan including public education, professional education, and electronic prescription monitoring for scheduled drugs in order to reduce abuse of prescription opiates and heroin from the demand (public health) side. It also recommends greater support for law enforcement in areas of the state that have been overrun with cheap potent heroin. If we are to address this problem effectively, we must address both the supply and the demand sides of the equation.

Previous Updates

What's New - August 2002

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