Posted by Alan Nye



Our speaker last Friday was Robert Fowler, Executive Director of the Milestone Foundation. For those unfamiliar with Milestone, it provides emergency shelter, as well as drug and alcohol addiction treatment to adults with chronic substance use disorders. The mission of Milestone is to provide the best services possible to help people with substance use and behavioral health disorders to attain stability, recovery and greater quality of life. (www.MilestoneFoundation.org)

Mr. Fowler focused his talk on the opioid epidemic in Maine. He noted that he’s on the Maine legislative task force to address the opioid crisis. Mr. Fowler made no bones about it: we are a nation suffering with a public health crisis and epidemic. 

Some statistics he gave were both tragic and alarming. As a nation, we suffered over 52,000 deaths last year due to overdoses. More people died from overdoses than were killed in automobile accidents – more than the deaths we suffered in Vietnam. Maine’s overdose death rate is more than 1 each day—a 40% increase.

Mr. Fowler emphasized that opioid addiction is a very complicated issue and he offered no simple solutions. He shared that Milestone offers homeless outreach and an overnight shelter, housing placement assistance, medically managed detox, residential treatment and transitional housing.

He described some of the services available at Milestone, including:

• Maine’s only 41-bed overnight substance use disorder emergency shelter;

• A Home Outreach and Mobile Engagement (HOME) Team that provides support to those with substance use disorders and responds to police, merchants, and citizens to provide services to those most vulnerable;

• A detoxification program for men and women struggling with substance use disorders; and

• An extended-care clinically managed 16-bed residential treatment program.

Mr. Fowler ended his remarks early and graciously answered question after question from Rotarians. He noted that addiction services are so lacking that only 1 in 10 people that desire treatment can access it. Unfortunately, overdose deaths are the single highest cause of death for those under 50. Where Milestone used to treat nearly 100% alcohol addiction, it’s now 50/50 with opioids/alcohol and the demographic is for younger and younger individuals.

When asked what we could do to help, Mr. Fowler suggested that we, as a club and as individuals, pressure our lawmakers to fund programs and allocate even greater resources to providers. We are losing a generation of young people to substance use disorders and we can only overcome this epidemic if everyone does their part. So what are you waiting for?

 

(Photo L-R: Steve Mortimer, Robert Fowler and President Don Zillman.)