There is a monster lurking our streets. He has been the subject of the last month’s headlines. The bane of concerned parents in Maine. He earned the ire of law enforcement and legislators.

D- Money.

“D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty – these types of guys – they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home…. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.” (PPH, “LePage in spotlight for saying drug dealers impregnate ‘white girls’” Jan, 7th 2016.)

D- Money is a drug dealer. He’s a deadbeat dad, likely black, and he threatens our children’s health and lives, and white men’s sexual access and hegemony over young white women.

D- Money is imaginary. As Gov. LePage admitted when backtracking on his statements “you can see [Maine is] 95 percent white.” Drug dealers need to cultivate a client base, settling and making connections with locals until they are caught or forced to move on. The mules moving the drugs from the south may be more racially diverse, but the dealers in our overwhelmingly white state happen to be overwhelmingly white. As NPR reported: “the night before he spoke, the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency arrested three people in Maine and charged them with distributing heroin. They were white. And their names — James, Jody and Donna.” (NPR, “#MemeOfTheWeek: ‘D-Money,’ Race And Drugs In America”, Jan 9th, 2016.)

D-Money’s mobility is what makes him scary. His car and drug money give him access and make him attractive to Maine women who would otherwise be dating Maine men. The best one can do to protect the dating pool is to scare young, white women into believing his mobility means he will leave them barefoot and pregnant. LePage’s remarks inform white women that dating black men is disapproved off, and their children will be seen as burdens who aren’t welcome in Vanillaland. I mean, Vacationland.

Sadly, D-Money’s imaginary health, economic and sexual threats are designed to cloak some real horrors in Maine:

-The fact that Maine’s heroin addicts are often otherwise respectable working class men whose access to healthcare is severely limited because the trades they work in (lobster, lumber, construction- high impact trades) are small scale or they are self-employed. This limits easy, understandable access to affordable healthcare. So when they are injured and in pain, they do not rest and heal properly because they can’t afford sick days. When their prescriptions run out they turn to the opiates available on the streets.

-The sexual traffic in Maine’s women is alarming, and the pimps and johns forcibly prostituting many of these women are their Mainer (likely white) boyfriends and neighbors. Often, they train them here and then ship them down to other states where more money can be made. The Bangor Daily News released information on the extent of the sex traffic here two days after LePage’s comments.

Monsters are usually imaginary enemies made up to encompass real problems and make them seem easier to defeat. LePage has a history of being against common sense measures to give Mainers more access to healthcare. He attended an Anti-Abortion Rally funded by churches in Augusta just last month, so he is clearly not working toward giving Maine women sexual autonomy in their choice of partners or reproduction. It’s much easier for LePage to introduce a phony monster to battle than to change his own reactions and make meaningful progress towards ending drug or sex traffic in Maine.