In the 20 years I have served my church, I have spent countless hours sitting with people fighting to overcome substance use disorder, and far too many more with the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones to that struggle.

I have held a mother shattered by the overdose death of her daughter and the the trembling hands of a grandmother who cannot not make sense of the brutal, drug-related murder of her grandson. I have experienced the collective anguish of a community as I stumble through a prayer at the funeral of a young adult who had everything to live for but instead overdosed alone in a room.

With the grief and anguish comes anger. How much of that suffering could we have prevented if we chose to treat every life as precious? We must stop abandoning our people as collateral damage in the “War on Drugs” in favor of the life-saving practices of harm reduction.

The Rev. Dr. William Barber often speaks of the “death measure” of regressive public policy — the understanding and acceptance that a policy will cause people to die, usually some of the most vulnerable among us. When Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1971, and then quickly recalibrated it into a racialized political tactic as part of the “Southern Strategy,” he didn’t shy from his policy’s death measure.

Neither did much of the country. We collectively turned a blind eye as we spent more than a trillion dollars over the years fighting this war, devastating Black communities in particular, who made up 30% of drug-related arrests despite being only 12.5% of substance users, and whose members were six times more likely to be incarcerated for drug-related offenses than their white counterparts charged with the same offenses (Center for American Progress), and permitted tens of thousands of Americans to die of overdose every year. (cdc.gov)

Maine’s current policies around substance use and SUD have an equally severe death measure. The ongoing refusal to treat the opioid epidemic as a public health crisis allowed 500 Mainers to die of overdose last year alone.

Maine’s policy of criminalization keeps thousands more locked in a vicious cycle that spins attempts to self-medicate trauma into felony convictions, which create barriers to the resources necessary to recover, leading to deeper trauma. And in 2018 in Maine, Black people made up about 1% of Maine’s population, but accounted for 21% of Class A felony drug arrests and 15% of Class B felony drug arrests.

It is well past time for us to move past the death measure of Maine’s regressive policies and instead choose the critical and life-affirming practices of harm reduction. Harm reduction is a collection of evidence-based techniques rooted in a fundamental belief that every life is sacred and worthy of care. It is a decision to reframe the epidemic of substance-related deaths away from criminalization and toward public health.

At the policy level, harm reduction puts into practice an acknowledgement that when we choose empathy over judgment, compassion over punishment, and treatment over prosecution, we are actively choosing life over death. That means recognizing that if trauma is most often the root of substance use disorder, then the path to recovery begins with healing the trauma, not compounding it through incarceration. It means taking steps such as making clean needles available, providing naloxone for free, decriminalizing drug possession, and creating safe usage sites.

And above all, it means measuring any and all new policies against one standard — will this practice help keep people alive to fight another day?

Maine lawmakers are considering a number of bills this year that would begin to make this shift, including LD 967, “An Act To Make Personal Possession of Drugs For Personal Use a Civil Penalty,” LD 1675, “An Act To Reform Drug Sentencing Laws,” and LD 994, “An Act To Promote Public Health by Eliminating Criminal Penalties for Possession of Hypodermic Apparatuses.”

We have the opportunity to turn away from the death-dealing policies of the past and choose instead life-giving practices for our collective future. We must encourage our lawmakers to do so.

Rev. Dr. Jodi Cohen Hayashida is minister of the First Universalist Church of Auburn. She writes on behalf of the Maine Council of Churches.

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