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Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell has announced $133 million in additional money for substance abuse treatment. The announcement came Saturday at the National Governors Association summer meeting at The Greenbrier. A news release says the Health Resources and Services Administration is adding $100 million for more substance use disorder services, with a focus on addressing medication-assisted treatment for opioid use. (7/25)

Last month, Mercy, Maine’s largest treatment center, closed its doors and eliminated 250 beds because of declining insurance reimbursement rates. For addicts such as Cross, that leaves only the state-funded rehab program; the wait is 18 months. And a political battle over treatment funding threatens to add to addicts’ desperation in Maine: Last year, about 40 percent of heroin addicts who got treatment were put on methadone therapy. But Gov. Paul LePage (R) has proposed ending state funding for methadone treatment, saving about $1.6 million over two years. (Fisher, 7/26)

It’s a place now ravaged by heroin — four overdoses, two of them fatal, in the past 10 months, in a town more accustomed to nothing of the kind. Maine is at the burning core of a nationwide heroin epidemic, the perverse outcome of a well-intentioned drive to save Americans from the last drug craze, a widespread hunger for heroin’s chemical cousin, prescription opiate pills such as Oxycontin. Heroin — now cheap, plentiful and more potent than ever — is killing people at record rates. (Fisher, 7/25)