BANGOR – A Baileyville man was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court to 18 months in prison for trying to buy OxyContin in the parking lot of a Bangor restaurant.

Thomas E. Merritt Jr., 20, also was sentenced to three years of supervised release following his release and must seek drug treatment. A conspiracy charge was dismissed at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“I apologize to the court, my family and the community for my actions,” Merritt said Tuesday as family members sat behind him. “I’m an addict. I know that I’ll always be an addict, and I’ll have to work hard on that.

“I hope people see what I’ve been through and learn from it,” he continued. “I had to learn the hard way. I’m glad I learned this way instead of not at all. If I had, I’d be dead.”

Merritt was arrested April 8, 2003, when he and Morgan Drew, 20, of Calais went to the Miller’s Restaurant parking lot with Allan Geiser, 33, of Brewer to buy the OxyContin pills from William Hiller of Providence, R.I. According to court documents, Hiller agreed to set up a drug buy in Maine in hopes of receiving a lesser sentence on his own pending drug charges.

They were arrested when they approached Hiller in the parking lot in the early evening. Robert O. Brewer II, 46, of Bangor was arrested later the same day at his business, The Diamond Connection, in the Airport Mall.

Drew was sentenced in May to 18 months in prison, and Geiser was sentenced in June to five years and three months in prison after pleading guilty to drug charges in federal court in Bangor. Brewer is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 15. The case against Hiller has not been resolved, according to court documents.

U.S. District Judge John Woodcock told Merritt on Tuesday that he was very lucky to have pleaded guilty when he did and sentenced when he was. Due to the impact of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the federal sentencing guidelines, Merritt’s sentence was about a year less than it could have been, the judge said.

In Blakely v. Washington, a Washington state kidnapping case, the high court in June ruled unconstitutional the state sentencing guidelines that allow a judge to use facts not considered by a jury to increase a defendant’s punishment.

Since the justices ruled 5-4 on the case, now referred to as Blakely, federal judges in Maine have not applied sentence increases previously allowed in the guidelines.

Under the sentencing guideline pre-Blakely, according to Woodcock, Merritt could have been sentenced to between 24 and 30 months in prison.

“You are very, very lucky,” Woodcock said Tuesday.