Maine Gov. Paul LePage says he did not make up story about high school student overdosing before attending class
LePage says he may ask for a federal investigation into whether Maine schools are telling him the truth.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage is in a dispute with a Portland high school over the veracity of a story he recently told, defending his veto of a bill to expand access to naloxone, about a student who repeatedly used the overdose reversal drug.
In fact, the debate over facts has escalated to the point that LePage said Monday he’s thinking of asking U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate.
The controversy all started earlier this month, during a town hall in Lewiston.
“A junior at Deering High School had three Narcan shots in one week,” the Republican governor said, according to the Bangor Daily News. “And after the third one, he got up and went to class. He didn’t go to the hospital. He didn’t get checked out. He was so used to it. He just came out of it and went to class.”
LePage was reportedly arguing that he could support the use of naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, if the user was immediately sent to rehab after being given the shot.
“Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose,” LePage wrote in his veto last month, which was later overridden.
However, the principal of Deering High School says the premise of the governor’s counterargument anecdote never happened.
“It’s not true. It’s absolutely not true,” Principal Ira Waltz told the Daily News, adding that the school does not have access to naloxone.
“I checked with the school nurse and the school-based health center, and we have no access to that medication,” Waltz said. “And so, if there was an overdose at Deering, we would have called 911. That would have been our intervention.”
On Monday, a group of Democratic Portland lawmakers followed up by calling on LePage to “publicly disavow his fabricated story.”
“Deering doesn’t deserve to have its reputation maligned by the highest elected leader in our state,” Maine Senate Democratic Leader Justin Alfond said in a statement.
But in an interview Monday afternoon, the governor insisted his story “was not fabricated,” though he noted he was told about it secondhand by a school resource officer.
“I’m thinking of calling this afternoon Attorney General Lynch and asking for her investigative arm to come up and look at the school systems in Maine,” LePage told the public radio program Maine Calling.
“They’re saying ‘No that’s fabricated.’ It was not fabricated. This was an actual conversation I had,” he said. “The police chief was even in the room.”
Reached for comment Monday, Portland Police Chief Michael Sauschuck told the Daily News that the governor was referring to a conversation he had with Deering High School Resource Officer Steve Black during a graduation ceremony for a local police-sponsored youth leadership program.
Sauschuck said that LePage was likely mixing up Deering High School with a local park in Portland called Deering Oaks:
Sauschuck, who said he has discussed the situation with Black more than once since LePage began telling the story in public, said Black referred to an overdose in Deering Oaks, not Deering High School.
“From [Black’s] perspective, at no time was he ever talking about youth, kids or Deering High School,” said Sauschuck, who added that in his 19 years in Maine law enforcement, he has never heard of a heroin overdose in a public school in Maine.
Sauschuck reiterated that point to the Portland Press-Herald: “I talked to Officer Black. The story was never about students. It was never about schools.”
During Monday’s radio interview, LePage said that he had heard of two other instances in which students had overdosed.
Nancy Dube, the Maine Department of Education’s statewide school nurse consultant told the Daily News she has heard of zero serious drug overdoses occurring in a Maine school.
The U.S. Justice Department did not immediately respond Monday to an email asking if LePage had in fact contacted the Attorney General’s office.
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