First, it was the sex offenders. Then it was the meth cooks. Now, a bill introduced in the Maine Senate would lay the groundwork for what would be the nation's first registry of habitual drug offenders. While proponents of such life-long branding of people who have completed their prison sentences cite public safety, opponents say registries unfairly stigmatize people who have paid their debt to society.

drug prevention or drug dealer advertising?

Introduced Tuesday by Sen. Bill Diamond (D-Cumberland County), the "Act to Study a Maine Habitual Drug Offender Registry" would direct the legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee to study creating a registry of persons repeatedly charged with drug dealing offenses. In published remarks, Drummond, who is co-chair of the committee, portrayed the measure as one aimed at helping families protect children.

"Drug abuse and the crime it perpetrates are one the rise in Maine. My intent is to take deliberate steps to examine any way and every way this increase can be combated," said Sen. Diamond in a press statement. "This legislation is a first step toward a tool Maine families can use to keep our communities and children safe from drugs and drug related crimes."

Drug arrests are up in Maine, along with an overall increase in the crime rate, and public officials were eager to blame drug use and drug sales. "2005 was the deadliest year in Maine for drug overdoses and a rash of bank, pharmacy and convenience store robberies were fueled by the demand for money to feed growing drug habits," said Public Safety Commissioner Michael Cantara in releasing crime and drug bust figures after a major cocaine bust last week.

"Mainers will not sit back and let these drugs continue to come into our state and corrupt our children. We need to make every effort, investigate every avenue, to fight drugs in our state. 'An Act to Study a Maine Habitual Drug Offender Registry' is just one avenue that could end up making a difference in bringing safety back to our streets," said Diamond.

But the bill has its critics. "Establishing a yellow pages for convicted drug dealers doesn't sound like a good idea to me," Shenna Bellows, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union told the Portland Press-Herald. "A better use of taxpayers' dollars would be to fund public education to keep kids off drugs and rehabilitation to keep users from turning into dealers."

The registry concept has also been criticized on moral, religious grounds. Frank Macchia, a minister in the Assembly of God, critiqued the broader issue of offender registries in an article last month in the magazine of ecumenical thought Vital Theology, criticizing sex offender registries as aiming to stigmatize and humiliate, rather than enhance public safety. Rather than seek to humiliate sinners, wrote Macchia, "As the people of God, we should not only seek to bear witness to Christ and to the redemptive grace that Christ channels to us, but also function in the public arena as salt of the earth."

So there are unanswered questions: Would such a registry turn out to provide advertising for would-be repeat offenders seeking more clientele, hence defeat their purpose? (They are calling it a "habitual" drug offender registry, after all, the group of people statistically most likely to re-offend.) And who will get the contract for the Scarlet Ds?