Her loved ones have a thousand anguished questions. But there’s no answering, really, why Kelley Newcomb started down the precipitous slope that ended with her death last spring at 21 from an accidental drug overdose.

She left behind a pocketful of prescription narcotics, a brokenhearted family, a shocked midcoast community and a sweet-faced 15-month-old son named Gage.

Kelley’s parents, Linda Nash and Rob Newcomb, have been divorced since Kelley was a youngster, but they both continue to live in the Belfast area, where they raised their two children. They are filled with outrage and grief at losing their only daughter to so senseless and destructive an end.

Though Kelley’s addiction to narcotics was fierce, they say it was the failure of the substance abuse treatment system that ultimately killed her.

Kelley had used street drugs, including prescription painkillers, antidepressants and other medications, since she was in high school. She got them from friends and, as she got older, through a network of area physicians who were unaware of her abuse problem and willingly wrote her legal prescriptions.

Because she was low-income, Medicaid paid for the drugs the doctors prescribed.

Sometime in the spring of 2001, when she was 19, Kelley started using heroin. Tipped off by an acquaintance, her horrified parents persuaded her to seek treatment for her drug habit.

But Kelley was pregnant, too. With her unborn child’s health to consider, she and her parents fixed on Acadia Hospital’s methadone clinic in Bangor, assured by the staff that a daily dose of methadone was the safest way to manage her cravings with the least potential for harming her baby.

“They told us they’d be able to wean the baby off the methadone after he was born and that Kelley’s dose would be tapered off until she didn’t need it anymore,” Rob recalled recently. “They never told her then that she’d be taking methadone her whole life.”

Kelley started making daily visits to Acadia for her dose of methadone. Sometimes she drove up with her mother; sometimes she went alone.

The methadone made Kelley sleepy, Linda recalled, and there were several episodes where her driving ability and judgment were clearly impaired.

When Gage was born, and after he was weaned from his own methadone dependency, Kelley brought him to live at her apartment in Belfast and continued to make the daily trip to Bangor.

After the baby’s birth, Rob and Linda expected their daughter’s dose of methadone to start coming down, and were startled when she told them she was taking doses as high as 210 milligrams a day, up from the 40 milligrams she was taking when she was pregnant.

But even at that dose, the methadone wasn’t enough to counteract their daughter’s cravings for other drugs. She continued to use street drugs – including OxyContin and other prescription narcotics – “doctor shopping” all through the midcoast area and Bangor to get her prescriptions filled.

With her parents threatening to take her son from her if she didn’t clean up her act, Kelley agreed to make a stronger commitment to recovery.

Leaving Gage in her parents’ care, she entered the Acadia Recovery Community, a residential treatment program at the hospital-owned Hope House, which houses the treatment program as well as providing food and shelter for transients.

Every morning, a bus took Kelley and a few other addicts from the program to get their dose of methadone at the hospital, returning them to the Hope House for counseling and other therapeutic activities.

But, living in such proximity to the transient population, her mother maintained, “[Kelley] could just step out the door and buy whatever [illicit] drugs she wanted.”

Eventually dropped from the Hope House program for possession of street drugs, according to Linda, Kelley went to live at Acadia-sponsored transitional housing, sharing space with other addicts trying to reclaim their lives.

She reportedly continued as a client at the methadone clinic, but she didn’t stop using street drugs. Linda maintains that the random drug tests the clinic says it performs were either omitted, misread or ignored.

“There is no way those tests could have been clean,” she said. “Kelley should have been discharged from that clinic. She was a loose cannon. My daughter was so inebriated by prescription drugs that she didn’t realize the last time she took a pill or what she took or how many milligrams it was.”

Acadia’s steadfast protection of Kelley’s privacy as a legal adult is especially galling to Linda and Rob. Their daughter was troubled, sick, drug-addicted and utterly incapable of acting in her own best interest, they said.

“But there was never any meeting about whether she was even capable of taking care of herself,” her mother said bitterly.

Kelley’s status as a client of the methadone clinic also made her ineligible for other, abstinence-based programs, most of which won’t accept clients who are still using any narcotics. And when she was arrested for writing a bad check to a hospital pharmacy, her lawyer argued, successfully, that a jail sentence would interfere with her methadone treatment.

Linda said Kelley would have been better off – safer – behind bars.

On May 28, 2003, Kelley’s roommate found her dead on the floor of her bedroom. The state coroner’s office found a combination of drugs in her young body, a lethal cocktail of antidepressants, pain relievers and anti-anxiety drugs – and methadone.

Linda said she had told staff at the clinic that Kelley was still using drugs on the outside, and that she should be dropped from the methadone program for her own safety.

“They expect drug addicts to tell them how much methadone they need,” Linda said, grief, scorn and fury forging a jagged edge in her voice.

“What do they expect them to say? They’re handing out drugs to druggies. They were increasing Kelley’s methadone and telling her she would probably be dependent on it her whole life. She was still using and they should have kicked her out of the program. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just running a legalized drug house there.”