The Unstoppable Maura Healey

Healey appears tireless. I tried to keep up with her for two days, and failed. Somewhere into the second day, a staffer asked if I was exhausted yet. (For the record: Yes, and my feet were killing me.) Healey’s workday is jammed with events and appearances; she walks briskly up and down stairs in her 2-inch pumps (she says she needs the exercise), through parking garages, around halls jammed with people who want her ear. In between, she confers with staff—and, of course, manages the top law office in the state. But her smile reveals no impatience, no indication that this or that delay will—and, inevitably, it will—jam up the rest of her day.

It was early in just such a day that Healey settled into the second row of the UMass Medical Center auditorium at the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners’ annual conference. When it was her turn to speak, she stepped out from behind the podium, ignoring her staff’s prepared statements and statistics. Nurses in cheerful spring pastels filled about half the seats in the small auditorium, leaning forward to hear. They laughed when she told them that her mother, grandmother, godmother, and great-aunt were all RNs, “and I was a sorry disappointment!”

But it wasn’t long before she was wiping away tears. “I get emotional when I think about what this group of nurses does,” she told them. “If the public only knew what goes on in our homes and our communities, they couldn’t imagine it. They couldn’t handle reading about it; they couldn’t handle living among it.” She thanked them for being on the front lines of sexual assault and domestic violence while also working with law enforcement.

Afterward, the audience swarmed Healey—holding her arm, taking selfies, coming in close for urgent conversations about their experiences and ideas and lives. They thanked her for a small but meaningful sound bite she’d skillfully worked into the previous day’s news cycle: She’d hijacked a question about Tom Brady and Deflategate to say, “I sure wish that the NFL would spend about a tenth of the time that it’s spending on this on issues of domestic violence and sexual assault.” That comment got quoted everywhere from Janet Wu’s Channel 5 news broadcast to Sports Illustrated’s website. Healey spent another half-hour with the nurses, pressing her aide’s business cards into their hands and insisting that they come to her office with their ideas. Her state troopers and aide stood back, hands folded. Healey was running late, but no one could pull her away.

Conversations like these—close, anecdotal, personal—drove opiate abuse to the top of Healey’s agenda. When she launched her campaign, she says, she knew little about the subject. Yet everywhere she went, from blighted urban neighborhoods to fancy suburbs to rural farms, someone would take her aside and tell her a story about someone whose life had been ruined by “the disease,” as she calls it. As Healey wrote in the Patriot Ledger in November, “Today, nearly one in five young people in Massachusetts has misused a prescription drug…. These drugs are too easily accessible and have become a pathway to heroin.” Meanwhile, heroin is claiming two to three lives a day in Massachusetts. According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, opioid-related deaths have increased 273 percent since 2000.

On the campaign trail, Healey listened, gathering names, facts, recommendations, and partners who would help her tackle the problem as broadly as possible. Now she’s launching a multi-pronged attack. She’s examining the MassHealth reimbursement database to identify doctors who may be overprescribing opiates and opioids. She’s investigating why the price of Narcan (naxolone)—a drug that reverses opiate overdoses—suddenly doubled after Governor Patrick made it available for all of the state’s emergency responders to carry.

Almost everyone agrees that the state’s opiate epidemic requires drastic action. But Healey has run afoul of her progressive base in her approach to marijuana. Although she says she supported decriminalization and medical marijuana—which are now the laws of the land—she opposes fully legalizing and regulating the drug, asking us to “wait and see” how legalization goes in other states first. Her statement comes as Massachusetts prepares for a ballot initiative that’s expected to go to a vote in 2016. (Many observers believe a statewide vote to legalize marijuana would pass easily; in 2012, Massachusetts voted to legalize medical marijuana by a 26-point margin.) Her face tightens when she’s asked to explain her position on legalization: “I think we’re going to end up with a lot of people walking around smoking a lot of pot…We all grew up with the stoners.” And besides, she adds, addicts in a Southie treatment center told her that pot was their gateway drug.

For a fresh new face like Healey, it’s a surprising argument, and one that was debunked by the Institute of Medicine in 1999. Roughly half of Americans have tried marijuana, according to the Pew Research Center, with about 7 percent saying that they used it recreationally within the past month. In contrast, the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated in 2011 that only 1.6 percent have tried heroin—ever. “Every Hell’s Angel started with a tricycle,” says Maia Szalavitz, a Soros Justice Fellow who cowrote the first evidence-based consumer guide to addiction treatment. “That doesn’t mean tricycles lead to motorcycle gang membership. People don’t start with marijuana; they start with alcohol and tobacco. The vast majority of marijuana users do not become addicts.”

Healey is a protectionist: She believes that government should guard us against lurking dangers, from predatory landlords and lenders to exploitive employers and greedy CEOs to marijuana and opioids. However, her public stand on marijuana has caused some in the civil liberties camp to look askance at her crusader’s red cape—concerned that she’ll forget she’s the state’s chief law officer, not its moral crossing guard. And while full legalization is opposed by a number of Massachusetts’ top leaders, including Governor Charlie Baker, House Speaker Robert DeLeo, and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, Healey’s opposition is complicated somewhat in that the AG is charged with certifying all statewide ballot initiatives. One longtime observer was dismayed by Healey’s public stance on marijuana, saying via email, “Since her office has the constitutional obligation to certify ballot questions, I think she needs to be more circumspect.”