Drug overdose deaths in Maine have fallen by 23% so far in 2025, continuing a trend of declining fatal overdoses over the last three years.
Maine recorded 292 overdose deaths from January through September of this year, compared to 379 deaths during the same time period in 2024, according to state data released late last week.
Gordon Smith, director of opioid response for Gov. Janet Mills’ administration, said a number of factors are contributing to the positive trend, including opioids coming into the U.S. that have lower concentrations of fentanyl, expanding prevention programs and greater use of naloxone, an opioid antidote.
“We’ve come a long way,” Smith said. “You can’t point to one thing. It’s an accumulation of all of our strategies: Prevention, harm reduction, treatment and recovery support.”
Maine peaked at 723 overdose deaths in 2022, after a decade’s worth of steady increases nearly every year. Since then, overdose deaths have fallen, to 607 in 2023 and 490 in 2024.
If current trends continue, Maine would end 2025 at less than 400 fatal overdoses, its fewest total in six years.
Nonfatal overdoses are also down 11.2% from January to September in 2025, compared to the same time period in 2024.
Maine’s decline in overdose deaths since 2023 has mirrored national trends. According to the most recent data available, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 24.5% decrease in fatal drug deaths from April 2024 to April 2025.
Gordon Smith, Maine’s director of opioid response. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer)
Smith said in Maine treatment is far more available — in one example, the state has 100 detox beds compared to 20 only five years ago — and the state does a better job of connecting people with substance use disorder to treatment.
He said the state’s OPTIONS program — Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach, Naloxone and Safety — has placed liaisons in all 16 counties whose job it is to reach out to people who have survived overdoses and connect them to treatment.
“I think that it makes quite a difference,” he said. “Otherwise there’s a strong likelihood they’re going to overdose again.”‘
Smith said expansion of treatment in jails has also helped, as one of the most vulnerable times for a person to overdose is when they’re being released from jail because their tolerance to substances is weakened.
Dr. Noah Nesin, an opioid treatment expert and medical director of Community Care Partnership of Maine in Bangor, said years of lower rates of prescribing opioids, at reduced doses, has helped prevent people from acquiring substance use disorder that started from a prescription.
Maine has one of the strictest opioid prescribing regulations in the nation, a reform passed in 2016 during Gov. Paul LePage’s administration. Morphine milligram equivalents — one metric used to measure opioid prescribing — has declined by more than half in the last decade, from 1.25 billion MMEs prescribed in 2015 to 473 million MMEs in 2024, according to state data.
Nesin said naloxone use is also a major factor.
“One reason we are seeing fewer fatal overdoses is how widely available naloxone is, and how completely it’s been taken up by the community who uses drugs, to save lives,” he said.
Hospitals are getting better at treating people who have overdosed, and connecting people who overdosed to treatment after they are released from the hospital, he said.
People have switched to other substances, too. Nesin said more people are using methamphetamine and cocaine, which are not typically as fatal as opioids like fentanyl.
“We certainly haven’t seen a decline in usage commensurate with how much overdose deaths have declined,” he said.
