Elevator Pitch:

David McCarthy was a 29 year old from Falmouth, Maine. When David was in high
school, one of his friends suffered a snowboarding injury and was prescribed a prescription drug
called OxyContin. He gave a few pills to his friends, including David,who was soon purchasing
the drug from dealers, like many other Maine residents. The state of Maine has a large
prescription drug abuse problem indicative of one in the greater US. The average median
income there is 48,453 dollars. Many workers have labor jobs, and an injury means missing a
paycheck. Theyre prescribed opioid painkillers and become addicted. Over the past few years,
the state has made these drugs more difficult to get.Tamper-proof prescription pads make
prescriptions harder to forge. The slow-reactant coating on Oxycontin, which addicts scrape off
the pills, is now more difficult to remove. Once this version hit the market, a 2012 survey by the
Washington University in St. Louis and Nova Southeastern University in Florida found that
opiate users who listed it as their primary drug dropped from 35.6% to 12.8% in less than two
years. The black market price of these drugs has risen substantially, to near 50 dollars for one
tablet. However, this had an unanticipated effect. Opioid addicts turn to cheaper heroin to get
the fix they cant afford from painkillers.The opium is grown in Columbia, where in 2006, they
grew enough to produce 4.6 tons of heroin. Mexican drug cartels smuggle the heroin across the
border. From 2008 to 2013, the amount of heroin confiscated there has increased by 1540
kilograms. Its brought to major east-coast cities, where local gangs and dealers dole it out. But
the further you get from the city, the more expensive heroin gets, so dealers have moved their
operations further and further away. Heroin used to arrive in single-dose tickets, but now
arrives in 10 gram fingers, to be diluted locally. David got into heroin through his high-school
girlfriend, who remained his dealer.While he attempted short stays in rehab, none of them took.
It also doesnt help that due to lack of state and federal funding, many rehabilitation clinics in
Maine are closing their doors.While the state of Maine recently passed Ld 1537, a bill to add
investigators to the Maine DEA, they have not focused on rehabilitation, nor has the rest of the
country.The people of Maine are being crippled on a yearly basis. We need more border
security to prevent heroin getting here in the first place. We need a better-armed, larger staffed
Drug Enforcement Agency. We need an inter-state alliance of most states in the Northeastern
US. We need state police forces to work together on an issue that affects all of them. And we
need rehabilitation. David died of an overdose. The next day, his little brother took a similar
dose. His family saved his life, and he has agreed to go to rehab, but it will be incredibly
expensive. We need this legislation federally.Support the Slippery Slope Act