BAR HARBOR – Dr. Margaret Greenwald isn’t Quincy, and she isn’t Gil Grissom either.

The state’s chief medical examiner told prosecutors Tuesday that the only thing she has in common with those television characters involves bodies.

“I wish my job was like ‘CSI,'” she said, referring to the popular CBS series in which Grissom is the chief character.

“I wish I could take a tiny bit of blood, put it in a tube, run it through a machine and have it tell me all the drugs a person took in just a minute. In reality, it’s just not like that,” she told the prosecutors.

In a presentation to the annual prosecutors’ conference, Greenwald and the deputy chief medical examiner, Dr. Michael Ferenc, said they conduct about 350 autopsies a year on people who die in Maine.

Their job is to determine cause, manner and circumstances of death in sudden, unexpected and violent deaths, Greenwald said. Unlike her television counterparts, including Jack Klugman in the “Quincy, M.E.” series in the late 1970s, Greenwald and Ferenc don’t solve crimes and they don’t interview suspects or witnesses.

That they leave to police, but they do testify at trials far more often than their television counterparts.

As forensic pathologists, the medical examiners also are called on to identify remains.

Most of the time, however, they assist law enforcement officers at death scenes and provide information for families, physicians, lawyers, insurance companies, police officers and prosecutors, Greenwald said Tuesday.

Under Maine law, a medical examiner must examine a body when there is:

. A suspected homicide.

. A suspected suicide.

. An accident or injury involved.

. The death of a child.

. A death in custody.

. A death when suspected gross negligence occurs during a medical procedure.

The external physical examination of a body does not necessarily lead to an autopsy, Greenwald said. In some car accidents, one of the 200 part-time medical examiners throughout the state could determine that a person involved in a single-vehicle accident had a stroke or heart attack that resulted in the crash. In that case, an autopsy might not be necessary, she said.

A family member’s suspicion that a relative might not have died of natural causes is not enough to trigger an autopsy, Greenwald said after her presentation Tuesday. Only a medical examiner, district attorney or the attorney general can order one.

“Often, we don’t hear about these suspicions until after the person is dead and buried,” she said. “I ask family members if they’ve talked to police and urge them to do so if they haven’t. I also might talk to the family physician to see if he or she had any concerns.”

Greenwald and Ferenc perform most of their autopsies on victims of car accidents and drug overdoses, she said Tuesday.

Of the 221 accident deaths reported in Maine in 2003, 19 autopsies were performed.

The dramatic rise in drug overdoses in Maine has increased the workload in her office, Greenwald said. There were 34 drug-related deaths in 1998. Four years later, there were close to 200, and she expects there will be about the same number this year.

Greenwald told prosecutors Tuesday that most drug overdose cases involve several drugs, often alcohol, and sometimes other medical factors, such as heart disease or obesity.

It’s also not possible yet to determine the rate at which the body metabolizes drugs such as methadone the way alcohol levels can be measured, so often it cannot be determined how much of a particular drug a person took before death.

“Right now, there’s no answer to making prosecutions easier,” she said, referring to charging people with aggravated furnishing of scheduled drugs.

The annual meeting of the Maine Prosecutors’ Association ends Thursday.