Nearly every family in Maine knows someone who has struggled with addiction. This is personal for me, I’ve lost two of my closest friends to heroin addiction. Now, crystal meth is taking over the streets of Portland and quietly infiltrating our small towns. The police are doing their best, but we need recovery systems that treat people with dignity and give them a real path forward. No slogans. No half-measures.

I support testing a new model of addiction recovery centers in high-risk states like Maine. These centers would provide residential living, accountability, and group discussion like many traditional recovery centers. However they would be built around giving people purpose and community, two of the most important things in recovery. These would be working centers, pairing recovery with responsibility and job training.

Participants would split their time between treatment and skill-building exercises. That could be culinary training with an on site restaurant. It could be built around the trades, where patients would learn basic carpentry, plumbing, or electrical work and be guaranteed entry into a free two year community college program if they meet certain criteria. The center could be a working farm. It could begin people on a track to become teachers, or paramedics, or maybe even recovery specialists.

Recovery works best when people have purpose, stability, and a future to work toward. We can save lives and rebuild communities by investing in both. If done right, this could be cost neutral.