Last Tuesday, Gov. Paul LePage was conspicuously absent from a New England-wide meeting called to discuss the national upsurge in opioid addiction — prompted by the widespread availability of heroin, and consequent hundreds of overdose deaths — and attempt to deal with it on a regional basis.

The other five governors — four Democrats and Independent Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island — made it, but LePage did not. His office cited a “scheduling conflict.”

The conflict was soon revealed to be a news conference LePage called in Augusta, flanked by law enforcement officers, to announce a 9 percent drop in reported crimes. That would have ordinarily been good news, but LePage had other things on his mind.

As soon became clear, LePage was there, and not in Massachusetts, because he wants to open a new front in the “war on drugs” — and not to talk about, and possibly help, the thousands of New Englanders addicted to heroin who may soon die through overdoses.

As LePage succinctly put it, “I am not so concerned right now with those that are addicted.” His counter-news conference, then, was to show he means business: “Rather than listen to chit-chat, I’m here trying to get work done.”

Of course, LePage was also engaging in chit-chat, but it’s also clear he has major differences with his fellow governors.

They all acknowledge that the “war on drugs” has failed, both nationally and regionally, and that controlling and preventing addiction among the people LePage is “not so concerned about” makes a lot more sense than increased criminal prosecutions.

LePage hasn’t considered the 40 years since Richard Nixon announced the original “war of drugs,” and the 30 years since Ronald Reagan began prosecuting it with billions of dollars in federal funding. This resulted, among other things, in a four-fold increase in the number of federal prison inmates and the world’s highest incarceration rate — and no decrease in use.

The strange thing is that it’s mostly Republicans who first pointed out that this “war” was doomed from the start. Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, Secretary of State George Schultz, who served under Reagan, and conservative economist Milton Friedman all described the absurdity of cracking down on those selling drugs while doing little or nothing about the millions of Americans using the same drugs.

In free market terms Republicans are usually expert at, you’re trying to cut off supply while leaving demand unchecked. The result is that we’ve wasted — and continue to waste — billions of dollars a year to combat drug sales, with no effect on users, or even on the price they pay.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s marijuana, cocaine, heroin or any of a bewildering variety of “designer drugs,” they’re all readily available on the street, in schools (and prisons), with the profits funneled entirely through the black market. This is why prohibition of alcohol, enacted through the Constitution’s 18th Amendment in 1919, was repealed by the 21st just 14 years later, the only amendment ever removed.

It isn’t that the social and economic costs of alcoholism — and drug addiction — aren’t enormous, but that legally prohibiting their use is the most expensive and least effective way we’ve found to deal with them.

LePage is undeterred. He responded to the upsurge in heroin deaths by vetoing a bill to make Narcan, the synthetic overdose antidote, more widely available, and by calling on the Legislature to authorize more drug enforcement agents. He even rejected a compromise to provide more money for treatment and law enforcement, with two-thirds for the latter.

Any suggestion that addicts need help, not punishment, is unacceptable to LePage.

Had he been there, he might have heard, for instance, Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont faulting federal regulators for approving evermore powerful prescription pain relief narcotics whose effects mimic those of heroin. Indeed, it was the crackdown on pharmacy robberies targeting Oxycontin that indirectly fueled the resurgence in heroin demand.

Let’s be honest here. Drugs, illegal and legal, are a human craving that has existed as long as we’ve had civilizations — possibly longer. Most adults can use them responsibly, but some cannot. What we then do, as a society, marks all of us, not just the millions of people we’ve put in jail over the last three decades.

We don’t have good answers, frankly, but we do know what doesn’t work, and has already failed. The next time a group of governors decides to meet about drug use, perhaps LePage could find time to attend. And listen.

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Douglas Rooks is a former daily and weekly newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 29 years. He can be reached at [email protected].