LEWISTON — Police late Wednesday were investigating a series of possible overdoses as four people fell ill throughout the evening.

Around suppertime, police received a report that a woman fell unconscious in an apartment on Maple Street. Police and rescue crews were sent.

A short time later, a similar occurrence was reported in another part of the city. Around 11 p.m., a man and woman in an apartment on Blake Street were reported to be suddenly ill, police said. The woman was suffering from a cardiac event.

All of the victims, said to be in their 20s and 30s, were hospitalized and expected to survive, police said. Details about the victims were not available as the investigation got underway.

Police did not say what kind of drugs were suspected. In recent years, drug investigators have warned that people using heroin in the Lewiston-Auburn area were susceptible to underestimating the potency of the drug they were ingesting.

Last spring, three people died after using heroin in the Twin Cities. At the time, drug officials described heroin use as a rising problem, here and in the state as a whole.

Heroin killed three times as many people in 2012 than it did in 2011 in Maine, according to numbers from the Office of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services. A total of 21 people died from abusing the drug in 2012.

Drug investigators said part of the problem stemmed from addicts replacing prescription drugs with heroin, which can be cheaper. The problem, a Maine Drug Enforcement Agency official said at the time, is that users don’t know the purity level of the heroin when they buy it.

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