The Vietnam War ended when pine boxes got too numerous to ignore. That – or the election of 2026 – is when the drug crisis in Maine ends, when people notice their friends and neighbors’ kids are dying, the drug house down the street, the increased violence around them, and finally care.
Last week, once again, Maine saw multiple drug-related overdoses, shootings, car chases, stash houses recognized, cases made, law enforcement – undermanned, underfunded, and unappreciated – struggling to get a handle on it, move in, and re-stabilize lovely Maine.
Behind the summer sunshine, happy fairs, lobster rolls, and wishing belief by tourists that all is “as it should be,” most Mainers know – things are not as they “should be,” not by a long shot.
Beyond record-high income taxes (newly up), added sales taxes (newly up), and intolerably high property taxes (newly up) – making property held for generations unaffordable – Mainers are reeling from a total lack of accountability by a shamelessly out-of-touch, one-party Democrat government.
Mainers – like overwhelmed blue cities across America – are also reeling from an ugly, downward spiral, drug trafficking, drug abuse, drug overdoses, drug death, and cascading effects of drug-related crime, poverty, homelessness, and loss. Worse than a nor’easter, vastly more devastating.
Year over year, for the past half dozen years, drug statistics have revealed a grim reality: Maine is under siege – and Maine’s governor and legislative leadership either do not see it, do not know what to do about it, misjudge its impact on our society, or do not care.
At first, monthly stories – like the May 2023 Bangor Daily News Maine story entitled “Drug Violence Overwhelms Small Downeast Police Forces” – have given way to weekly accounts that everyone hoped were anomalies, one-offs, not-to-be-repeated, and then came the wave: daily carnage.
That is where we are today, where a dozen major events occur every week, multiple events a day – drug trafficker attacks, shootings from beleaguered Lewiston and South Portland to otherwise quiet Raymond and Rumford, from the southern tip of the state, essentially a Boston suburb, to Holton and points north. We are on an island of sorts, watching the tide come in, with no high tide line.
That, contrary to what an indifferent, objectively out-of-step Democrat governor tells the Maine People, contrary to what a Democrat-controlled Maine legislature wants Maine to know, is what is really happening. Maine is under siege, isolated from more federal help by ego and arrogance.
Maine is facing the worst public safety crisis in the state’s long and noble, if not untroubled, history. Instead of standing up, stepping up, using state and federal resources to up-fund, up-man, up-reward, and restart effective, coordinated, multi-level law enforcement initiatives, using expertise at their fingertips, methods, systems, and programs that work, Democrat leaders just look away.
Ending the human carnage caused by widespread drug abuse across Maine, drug-related crime, and foreign sources wrecking peace here will take focus. Halting the wide, rising tide of drug trafficking, loss of life, and destruction of normalcy in Maine will take unblinking political will.
It will also take joint interagency task forces, federal-state-local intelligence sharing, surge operations, elevated federal law enforcement, coordinated with re-empowered State Police troopers – more of them and more DEA, ICE, CBP, and High Intensity Drug Trafficking Designations.
It will take close contact with the Office of Justice Programs in DC (fresh resources), Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Programs (OJJDP), White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and with the Regional Information Sharing System (RISS).
It will take a governor close to and comfortable with the Trump White House, the kind of resolve that Trump has shown in cleaning up DC. The next governor of Maine will need to leverage ties to the federal treatment hub, SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, to backfill – create a “get well, stay well plan” for a Maine finally rid of the foreign drug traffickers.
Bottom line: Maine is in crisis, the throes of multiple crises, from a feckless, ideologically lost governor and legislature spending, taxing, and slowly bankrupting Maine families, to the spiraling drug overdoses and drug crime, radiating circles of public insecurity and distrust. But…when the pine boxes get too numerous to ignore, as in Vietnam, things change. They are about to change.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
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