SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Drug abuse in eastern Maine has exploded in just the past three years and will reach epidemic proportions if the public doesn’t rise up against the problem with more money, manpower and community involvement, drug treatment and enforcement experts told a crowd of 200 on Thursday.

Eight drug-abuse experts presented a grim overview of the “huge increase” in hard drug use in Greater Bangor in just the past 18 months.

Matthew Erickson, an assistant state attorney general who works with the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, said most of his cases involved marijuana use in 2001, and today most deal with heroin and narcotic prescription drug abuse.

“In Washington County, it’s pills,” he said. “In Bangor, there’s an awful lot of heroin cases and pill cases.”

A record 166 Mainers died of drug overdoses last year, a fivefold increase in five years. The death count includes 64 residents of Penobscot, Washington and Hancock counties, officials said.

Erickson and other enforcement officials said the state needs not only more police officers and investigators, but more judges and prosecutors. Treatment experts, meanwhile, spoke of the growing threat of heroin and other hard drugs not only to adults in the tri-county area, but youths as young as 13.

They all agreed that more money needs to be spent on prevention and treatment to try to divert people from a legal system that is ill-prepared to handle the influx of new cases. Bill Goodwin, a probation officer in Washington and Hancock counties, said drug and alcohol addicts must wait three to six months for a residential treatment bed, and even outpatient programs are clogged and overburdened.

Meanwhile, Maine’s county jails are filled with drug and alcohol addicts who are getting little or no treatment for addiction.

And not only are they not getting help, they are able to buy drugs inside Maine prisons and jails.

“We’re just putting them in useless warehouses,” said George Swanson of Southwest Harbor, who visits Hancock County Jail inmates once or twice a month. “They’re going to get out and they’re going to be our neighbors, and they haven’t learned much good in the two, three, four years they’ve been in there.”

Weldon Leonard, a Southwest Harbor businessman, inspired Thursday’s forum when he approached selectmen recently and showed them the syringe and other drug-related items he found in one of his business trucks. He insisted that police needed to do more to enforce the law and clean up the town. He said people needed to begin talking about how to attack the problem. Community leaders, with the backing of selectmen, then organized the forum and asked experts to talk about the problems and take residents’ questions. “If this [drug abuse trend] continues, and it will unless we take more action, we’re going to have an epidemic,” said Barbara Royal, director of the Open Door Recovery Center in Ellsworth. Royal said adults were primarily battling alcoholism just two years ago in her treatment programs, but the addiction problem has rapidly switched to heroin and powerful prescription drugs such as OxyContin.

Royal said her agency, founded in 1984, recently had to lower the age eligibility to 13 because Open Door was getting several referrals and had previously only accepted children who were at least 14. She said Open Door is beginning to receive referrals of 12-year-old children who need drug or alcohol treatment.