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Alexis Crawford is a Buxton resident and volunteer outreach coordinator with The Phoenix Maine, a free, sober-active community for people in and around recovery.

I recently attended an Eggs and Issues event hosted by the Portland Chamber of Commerce, where the topic was public safety in Portland. The panel included Mayor Mark Dion, the chief of police and the Cumberland County district attorney. Right away, on answering the first question, the mayor said, “Addicts are taking us hostage,” then joked about considering trying drugs himself because he has so much on his plate.

Backing up a bit, I met Mayor Dion at this same event a year ago. We had a genuinely warm conversation about the importance of helping people in recovery. That contrast is part of why this year’s comment stuck with me. This isn’t a man who doesn’t know better. It’s a man who, under the pressure of a real and difficult public safety problem, reached for language that turns people into enemies.

I understand the mayor has a lot on his plate. Portland’s public safety challenges are real, and no one on that stage was wrong to take them seriously. But “hostage” is not a word you use about people. It’s a word you use about a threat. And when the person using it is also the person responsible for public policy toward that group, the word does damage that outlasts the laugh line that followed it.

The mayor spoke about wanting to keep Portland safe for his daughters and his constituents. What he didn’t say is that people struggling with addiction are also his constituents, and by definition, some of them are also parents hoping to keep their own kids safe. They are someone’s mother, brother, sister, father or friend. These are not abstractions. They are neighbors dealing with a disease, not an occupying force.

At the end of the day, language matters because stigma has a measurable cost. Last year in Portland, overdose deaths dropped from 47 to 21, even as total overdose incidents hit a record high. Advocates credit wider access to naloxone and legal protections that make people less afraid to call 911 when someone overdoses. That only works if people feel safe coming forward, and stigmatizing language runs counter to exactly that. When elected officials model contempt instead of concern, they make it harder, not easier, for people to come forward for help.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument against holding officials accountable for public safety outcomes, and it isn’t a defense of every choice someone in active addiction makes. Some of what was proposed on stage at the event was worth supporting. I agreed with the calls for more mental health resources and more beds in recovery centers. Maine has gone from 20 detox beds to 100 in five years, progress worth building on, not abandoning for tougher talk.

Solutions like these treat the underlying problem rather than manage its optics.

What I’m arguing is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: whatever solutions we choose, we do not get to talk about the people affected by them as though they are the enemy. A mayor can be serious about public safety and still speak about addiction with basic human decency. Those two things are not in tension. 

In fact, decency is probably a precondition for actually solving this, since people rarely seek help from a system that has just called them a hostage-taker.

Portland has real work to do on public safety. It will not get there faster by dehumanizing the people at the center of the problem it’s trying to solve.