The old adage, “You cannot bolt a door with a boiled carrot,” has a modern version: “You cannot protect people without well-funded law enforcement.” From Maine to Montana, as drug trafficking – Colombian, Mexican, Chinese – crests, police are in a troth. That has to change.
Much of rural America is suffering the collapse of local law enforcement presence, resources, personnel, and public safety. While 2020’s “defund police” activism crushed morale, recruiting, retention, and respect for the hardest job in America, triggering ambushes and suicides, things are getting worse.
In places like rural Maine, where one of the state’s 16 counties is the size of Delaware, getting officers to sign on, and ensure good pay, training, and equipment has always been a challenge.
These days, federal, state, and local budget cuts, together with a stunning spike in foreign-source drug trafficking – especially rising Chinese and Mexican fentanyl trafficking, high-potency Chinese marijuana grow houses, foreign cocaine, heroin, and synthetics, are putting the law itself at risk.
What was a contained forest fire … is becoming a runaway wildfire, with few constraints. In recent weeks alone, drug busts in Farmington, Rockland, Madison, Norridgewock, Kennebunk, Auburn, Gray, Hudson, Mexico, and other Maine towns drive home the mounting danger.
Maine is under siege, but so is all of rural and suburban America – West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee to Georgia and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa to Massachusetts and New York.
What the traffickers have learned, as they flooded the country over the last three years – along with illegal aliens arrested and released, set free awaiting unvetted asylum claims, or just surging the southern and northern borders, is that rural America is largely unpoliced.
What does this mean in real terms? It means we are quietly under siege, seeing overdoses skyrocket – in Maine alone, overdoses are up hundreds of percent in a dozen years, even with Narcan available. We are seeing young people addicted and dying in record numbers.
Having sat with young Mainers addicted to fentanyl, polydrug addicted, and recently using fentanyl-laced with xylazine, the hopelessness is hard to bear, options for detox, effective treatment, and a change of circumstances to save their lives… limited.
This is the backside of the coin, what happens when a governor and president – yes, the Democrat Janet Mills and Biden-Harris Administrations – soft-shoe the hard drug problem. When traffickers from New York and Boston think they have free reign in Maine, police thin, kids pay the price.
With limited discussion of the issue in many counties, states, and nationally, as well as policies that elevate the vulnerability of kids, Maine saw 10,000 overdoses in 2022, 723 were deadly. The rise in use, addiction, related crime, and family dysfunction, can hardly be measured.
Notably, in 2013 – one year after the last Republican governor and legislature held power – Maine had one fentanyl death, and 176 overdose deaths total. In 2022, after a decade of Democrat governors and legislatures, Maine had 560 fentanyl deaths, and 723 overall drug deaths – a 560-fold increase in fentanyl deaths, a four-fold increase in overall deaths.
Sadly, on the record, Democrats in Maine spend more on solar farms, wind turbines, and housing illegal aliens than saving kids from drug overdoses.
For specifics, any state with a rural population – and most have expanses – is seeing an uptick in foreign drug trafficking, the presence of transnational organized crime, and the results. But some, like Maine, are struggling to keep any police within striking range of active trafficking crimes.
Ironically, there is nothing inevitable about victimization of rural Maine, or rural anywhere. In the 1970s and 1980s, as trafficking in cocaine, heroin, and meth expanded, Republican and Democrat leaders – including governors and attorneys general – stepped up, cooperated, and reversed the rise.
Today, Maine state police have cut or reduced patrols to multiple counties, Washington to Somerset, while nationally rural police lose officers faster than they can recruit them – at a time when drug traffickers, aided by a porous border, are pouring new traffickers into these areas.
So, from north to south, east to west – within rural Maine, and well beyond Maine – what is the answer in 2024? The answer is to seek leaders who appreciate police, fund them well, help them attract new and committed officers, honor those officers, and take back the lost ground.
Each year we fail to prioritize public safety, at state and federal levels, is a year closer to totally losing the rule of law. In places like Maine, and nationwide in rural America, that matters. Why? Because, as the old adage goes, “You cannot bolt a door with a boiled carrot.”
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
