LEWISTON — For police, questions remained a day after four people suffered heroin overdoses in the downtown.
All four victims survived, but on Thursday, police and drug officials were working to pin down what caused them to fall ill.
Lewiston police Lt. Michael McGonagle said investigators were trying to locate the source of the drugs. What remained unclear was whether all four victims got the dope from the same dealer and whether all of the heroin came from the same batch.
Early in the evening Wednesday, a man and woman inside a Maple Street apartment were reported to be suffering symptoms of overdose.
Hours later, on Blake Street, another couple had fallen ill, with a man said to be unconscious and a woman suffering a cardiac event.
All of the victims, said to be in their 20s and 30s, were hospitalized. They were not identified as the investigation continued. No charges had been filed by late Thursday.
Heroin overdoses generally involve dipping blood pressure and heart or respiratory failure.
According to McGonagle, while there is known heroin use in the Twin Cities, the overdoses reported Wednesday don’t necessarily represent a spike in use.
“This doesn’t necessarily mean there’s been a rise in drug use,” the lieutenant said, “but there’s been a shift from prescription drugs to heroin.”
The reason: heroin is cheaper than prescription drugs and, in many ways, easier to get. A user buying heroin on the street does not have to bother with a visit to a doctor’s office in hopes of getting a prescription.
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.
In the spring of 2013, three people died after using heroin in the Twin Cities. At the time, drug officials described heroin use as a rising problem, both here and in the state as a whole.
Another potential factor for increased heroin use comes from a new law, recently put into effect, that caps methadone use for a patient at two years, after which drug-addicted Medicaid patients lose coverage for methadone treatment. Whether that means more addicts are bouncing back to heroin remains to be seen, police said.
Maine Attorney General Janet Mills and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner have reported that 176 drug deaths occurred in Maine in 2013, 13 more than the year before. Of the fatalities, 105 were blamed on pharmaceutical opioids while 34 were attributed to heroin.
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