The Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety Initiative (OPTIONS) Project-to-Date Totals through May 31, 2022

This brief provides updates on the OPTIONS initiative based on data reported by OPTIONS liaisons. Liaisons are licensed behavioral health clinicians that are embedded within a law enforcement agency in each of the sixteen counties in Maine. At present, each county has one appointed liaison that works alongside law enforcement to provide short-term counseling interventions, conduct proactive outreach with communities at the highest risk of experiencing an overdose, de-escalate behavioral health crises, and engage in postoverdose follow up visits and referrals of persons in need, as well as affected others, to community- and state-based services

Structural Inequalities in the Opportunity Maine Tax Credit

Daniel Soucier discusses the structural inequalities in the Maine Opportunity Tax Credit

“News of Provisions Ahead”: Accommodation in a Wilderness Borderland during the American Invasion of Quebec, 1775

Soon after the American Revolutionary War began, Colonel Benedict Arnold led an American invasion force from Maine into Quebec in an effort to capture the British province. The trek through the wilderness of western Maine did not go smoothly. This territory was a unique borderland area that was not inhabited by colonists as a frontier society, but instead remained a largely unsettled region still under the control of the Wabanakis. On the northern periphery of this borderland the Quebecois and Wabanakis supplied Arnold and his men with provisions, aid, and intelligence. It was the assistance of French habitants and Wabanakis in Quebec that saved the mission. Historians who have written about Arnold’s march through this borderland region have tended to view it as simply a heroic feat by the American force. Yet, both the natural and human environment of this borderland region played a significant role in the expedition’s near failure to escape the Maine wilderness and ultimately its success in reaching Quebec City. The author is a graduate student at the University in Maine, focusing on the environmental history of the American Revolution. He is the secretary of the Environmental Studies Coalition at the University of Maine, co-editor of the Khronikos blog and journal, and the webmaster of the Northeastern Atlantic Canada Environmental History Forum

The Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety Initiative (OPTIONS): Project-to-Date Totals through September 30, 2022

This brief provides updates on the OPTIONS initiative based on data reported by OPTIONS liaisons. Liaisons are licensed behavioral health clinicians embedded within a law enforcement agency in each of the sixteen counties in Maine. At present, each county has one appointed liaison that works alongside law enforcement to provide short-term counseling interventions, conduct proactive outreach with communities at the highest risk of experiencing an overdose, de-escalate behavioral health crises, and engage in postoverdose follow up visits and referrals of persons in need, as well as affected others, to community- and state-based services

The Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety Initiative (OPTIONS): Project-to-Date Totals through August 31, 2022

This brief provides updates on the OPTIONS initiative based on data reported by OPTIONS liaisons. Liaisons are licensed behavioral health clinicians embedded within a law enforcement agency in each of the sixteen counties in Maine. At present, each county has one appointed liaison that works alongside law enforcement to provide short-term counseling interventions, conduct proactive outreach with communities at the highest risk of experiencing an overdose, de-escalate behavioral health crises, and engage in postoverdose follow up visits and referrals of persons in need, as well as affected others, to community- and state-based services

The Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety Initiative (OPTIONS) Project-to-Date Totals through June 30, 2022

This brief provides updates on the OPTIONS initiative based on data reported by OPTIONS liaisons. Liaisons are licensed behavioral health clinicians that are embedded within a law enforcement agency in each of the sixteen counties in Maine. At present, each county has one appointed liaison that works alongside law enforcement to provide short-term counseling interventions, conduct proactive outreach with communities at the highest risk of experiencing an overdose, de-escalate behavioral health crises, and engage in postoverdose follow up visits and referrals of persons in need, as well as affected others, to community- and state-based services

Navigating Wilderness and Borderland: Environment and Culture in the Northeastern Americas during the American Revolution

This dissertation examines the evolving interactions of nature and humans during the major military campaigns in the northern theatre of the American War for Independence (1775 – 1783) as local people, local environments, and military personnel from outside the region interacted with one another in complex ways. Examining the American Revolution at the convergence of environmental, military, and borderlands history, it elucidates the agency of nature and culture in shaping how three military campaigns in the “wilderness” unfolded. The invasion of Canada in 1775, the expedition from Quebec to Albany in 1777, and the invasion of Iroquoia in 1779 are the interconnected comparative case studies that inform this project. As human and non-human actors alike utilized the chaos of war to further distinct goals and purposes, the levels of assistance or resistance that each provided to the large British and Continental forces that arrived from outside of the bioregion directly influenced the geopolitical and martial outcomes of campaigns. The study argues that as European-style war machines groped forward, in unfamiliar territories, and navigated both ecological and cultural landscapes that the Northeast Borderlands exerted substantial causal force. This contiguous bioregion stretched from the District of Maine and Quebec in the east through northern New York and northwestern Pennsylvania, and from Montreal to Iroquoia and beyond during the latter half of the eighteenth century. South of this borderlands was the emergent Euro-American imperial power of the thirteen colonies that would become the United States, and to its north were the British colonies of Nova Scotia and Quebec. The Northeastern Borderlands was a mostly autonomous region in between colonial settlements that deployed military force as a principal means to expand. This dissertation examines the intertwined relationships among varied cultural and environmental landscapes in a large bioregion, on the one hand, and the process of waging war on the other. Careful attention to the distinct human ecology of the Northeastern Borderlands, its causal significance helps to transcend nationalistic interpretations of history that still dominates popular and scholarly understanding of the past, in general, and of the American Revolution, in particular

The Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety Initiative (OPTIONS) Project-to-Date Totals through March 31, 2022

This brief provides updates on the OPTIONS initiative based on data reported by OPTIONS liaisons. Liaisons are licensed behavioral health clinicians that are embedded within a law enforcement agency in each of the sixteen counties in Maine. At present, each county has one appointed liaison that works alongside law enforcement to provide short-term counseling interventions, conduct proactive outreach with communities at the highest risk of experiencing an overdose, de-escalate behavioral health crises, and engage in postoverdose follow up visits and referrals of persons in need, as well as affected others, to community- and state-based services

At the Confluence of Public Policy and History: The Value of Historical Thinking in Public Policy Development

Daniel Soucier explains why conversations between those who study how policy decisions affected society in the past and those tasked with shaping the future are beneficial

The Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety Initiative (OPTIONS): Project-to-Date Totals through February 28, 2022

This brief provides updates on the OPTIONS initiative based on data reported by OPTIONS liaisons. Liaisons are licensed behavioral health clinicians that are embedded within a law enforcement agency in each of the sixteen counties in Maine. At present, each county has one appointed liaison that works alongside law enforcement to provide short-term counseling interventions, conduct proactive outreach with communities at the highest risk of experiencing an overdose, de-escalate behavioral health crises, and engage in postoverdose follow up visits and referrals of persons in need, as well as affected others, to community- and state-based services