 A couple of weeks ago, the Portland Police Department implemented a program where our uniform patrol officers that work the street 24-7365 are now trained and equipped with individual packets of Narcan. And that's four milligrams, and really what Narcan is for a lay person, call it an antidote for opioids and an opioid overdose. And now they've received training, they have a certification that would allow them to utilize Narcan. When they run into these situations, what Narcan looks like is a small packet like that, very similar to something you may find, a flonase as an example or something of that manner. This isn't a prop, this is something that I'm certified to carry, something I carry for duty every day. So it's something that our officers now carry as well when they're working the street. The volume of overdose situations that our officers find themselves in in this community is really overwhelming. The opioid epidemic has impacted our entire country, and certainly right here in our own backyard it's something that we see on a regular basis. So in the city of Portland, a beautiful spot where we live and work and raise families, we had 46 fatal overdoses in 2015. The vast majority of them did involve an opioid of one sort or another, whether that's heroin and fentanyl or some kind of a mix, and it's killing people right here in our community. And what we found is that we had a lot of fatal overdose situations and a lot of substance use disorder stemming from prescription medications. There's been a lot of conversations, there's been a lot of work around prescription meds. So now as that supply slowly got weaned off and cut back on by the medical profession and law enforcement, individuals made personal decisions and business decisions that say that if I'm going to buy an OxyContin as an example illegally on the open market off the street, that may be a dollar or a milligram. So you may buy one Oxy80, 80 milligrams, that costs you $80. When you could buy heroin for five, seven, ten dollars a bag, you know, if you suffer from a substance use disorder which is a brain disease and you're driven not to get sick, you're driven not to detox in your bedroom or in the jail, you're going to pursue something that's readily available and cheap. And that happens to be heroin. And unfortunately heroin is now laced with fentanyl and other things that are far more potent than the original heroin back in the day or even recently. And now we have these fatal overdose scenarios because people really don't know what they're using. You can use for ten years and know exactly how much you can take and how much you can use, but if the next batch that you get is cut with something that's incredibly strong, you may not survive. And that's what we're seeing, acts every walk of life, every walk of life. Because it's the high school kid that blew his knee out. It's the soccer mom that they got OxyCotin for getting their wisdom teeth out. Back injuries, you name it, they can happen to anybody at any time. So we're finding that this runs the gamut from incredibly young to those that are elderly based on definition. It's impacting everybody. You have to have prevention, you have to have treatment, and you have to have enforcement. If you just focus on any one of those three legs without equal disbursement of resources and time and energy, then you're gonna fail. So we do need to focus on prevention. We've got to be talking to our kids as early as possible, as often as possible. It does focus on treatment. You have to have options. You have to have detox beds, and you have to have residential opportunities. And medically assisted treatment is incredibly imperative to this equation. And we need to continue to enforce the laws as they exist. Because if you're a predator and you're bringing dope into our community and you're killing people, you need to pay for that. You need to be punished for that. So it has to be all three legs. And there's only 16, 16, 16 detox beds in the entire state of Maine. Now it happens to be housed at the Milestone Foundation, which is an incredible organization, a block and a half from us, head to East here from the police department. But imagine having 16 beds for 1.3 million people. And they will tell you that they estimate that they turn away about 100 people a month that are seeking treatment. And they just don't have the space, they don't have the capacity. They don't have the ability to treat everybody. There's some great programs out there. There's some good people working hard on this issue. The Greater Portland Addiction Collaborative is an organization with the backbone is Mercy Hospital and Milestone is at the table, the Portland Recovery Community Center ourselves. There's a lot of good people there, community housing in Maine. And that's a process unlike anyone that I've seen across the state or the country for that matter. And it's really geared to be a comprehensive community based sustainable model. And we need more programs like that. And the issue is money, it's resources. It's really, and I talk about it a lot. It's really moving beyond the interest phase where people want to talk about this to the investment stage where people actually want to do something about this. If you know somebody that's suffering from an opioid related substance use disorder, then the first thing I'd ask you to do is get educated. Learn really what you're talking about. Find out what your resources are locally. The legislation was recently passed that if as a family member or friend, somebody that's in that world, you can be prescribed Narcan. So you'll have that life saving drug available to you if God forbid you need it in your loved one you find them in the house or in car or in any location. And you're going to have the immediate opportunity to potentially save their life. And then I would say on top of that, to be involved moving forward, hold our elected officials responsible for legislation and for the support of this population and of all of us. So I think it's very, very important that people reach out. They find out who their recovery allies are in the community and there are plenty but you just got to figure out what works for you. What community are you in and what resources are available. I'll tell you, we didn't carry Narcan for a long time simply because we have a full time advanced life support service with our paramedics and our fire department. We have an incredible partnership and there's really good people over there. So traditionally we respond to overdoses together at the same time when we arrive. But I will say that over the last four days we've used Narcan four times. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and then we used it again last night. So it's those scenarios that we want to make sure that officers have the tools necessary again to do that job. If you can try to save somebody's life, whether you're saving 30 seconds before Meku gets there or a minute or two minutes or there are going to be 20 minutes. We don't know and I'm not saying that we're directly saving lives because paramedics are right behind us, but I think we are. It makes sense that if we have an opportunity to use this, that it's given these victims, it's given our residents a leg up for survival. And I think it's important that we do it.