The announcement last week by Purdue Pharma that an abuse-resistant form of its powerful painkiller OxyContin may not be ready for several more years is profoundly discouraging news for Maine, a state reeling from addiction to what is commonly called Downeast heroin. For those who would lead the state – candidates for legislative, gubernatorial and congressional offices- it is a challenge that must be confronted in the coming campaigns.

There is little question that OxyContin is a valuable drug for those suffering severe pain from cancer and other illnesses. When swallowed whole, the tablets provide continuous and consistent relief for up to 12 hours.

When crushed and then chewed, inhaled or injected, however, OxyContin becomes a powerful and sometimes deadly narcotic that produces an intense heroin-like high. Abuse is rampant everywhere – Maine, West Virginia and Kentucky are widely cited as evidence that addiction is a much a rural scourge as urban, as are the accompanying scourges of property crime and violence.

Purdue Pharma had hoped to be marketing an abuse-resistant form by next year. Unfortunately, attempts to include non-dissolving beads of the narcotic-blocker naloxene in the tablets, so that if the tablets were crushed the naloxene would enter the bloodstream and block the narcotic, have not worked – legitimate pain relief sometimes also got blocked. The manufacturer is now trying another blocker, naltrexone, but complete testing and government approval could take four or five years.

Maine, of course, cannot wait four or five years. Entire communities are being devastated by abuse of this drug, addicted babies are being born to addicted mothers, cancer patients – many of them frail elderly – live in constant fear of becoming victims of crime. Not to mention the new addicts being created every day and the lives of misery they enter.

The response of state government so far has concentrated on the aftereffects. The new drug courts rightly put addicts into treatment instead of jail, treatment programs are expanding, although the recent rash of overdose deaths from methadone – more than 20 just this year – strongly indicates the expansion has been hasty.

The state’s response on prevention – that is, interdicting the drug as it is smuggled into the state, tracking the prescriptions, investigating the thefts and prosecuting the criminals – has been anemic. Despite the steady growth of this problem over several years, there is no significant legislation on the books, no new initiatives proposed, no concerted effort to work with other jurisdictions and other law enforcement agencies.

During the just-concluded primary campaign, precious few candidates for governor or Congress offered anything other than the banal observation that the best cure for drug abuse is a robust economy. Some of the better-informed candidates pointed to the deployment within a year of abuse-resistant OxyContin as a way out. Now that deployment is on hold for four or five years – in fact, given the urgency, it is irrelevant. Purdue Pharma’s problem now has become Maine’s crisis and leaders are required.