BATH — Bath police believe at least two residents in the small city have died after overdosing on prescription drugs during the first two months of 2012.

It’s only the second time Lt. Stan Cielinski can remember such a “bunching” of overdose deaths.

While the official cause of death in the cases has not been determined by the State Medical Examiner’s Office — a process that can take weeks, if not months — Cielinski said Wednesday that evidence at the scene of two of the deaths leads police to believe they result from overdoses of narcotics.

On Jan. 14, the body of 35- year-old Sean Duffy of Bath was found in a room at the Hampton Inn. Police said at the time that they believed Duffy died from an overdose of illegally obtained prescription narcotics.

Police responded 11 days later to Court Street, where a 68-year-old woman had apparently died of an overdose of medications that had been prescribed to her, Cielinski said at the time.

On Wednesday, he added, “We believe the person was abusing her own prescription medication.”

Bath Police Detective David Beauregard, who also works as an investigator for the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, said Wednesday that more than half of his cases now involve prescription drugs.

“It comes in waves,” he said. “ We’ve had prolific prescription drug (cases) in the past four to five years. They’re easily obtained, and people know what they’re getting. When you get an oxy(codone) 15 or oxy 30, they know exactly what they’re getting. When you buy heroin, they don’t know how much it’s been cut. What we get in Maine isn’t that pure.”

Because many prescription drugs can be purchased at a reduced cost through state or federal insurance plans, there’s money to be made if a prescription can be obtained.

“If you’re getting Oxycontin, if you can sell one pill for $20 to $50, and it cost you $5 with your co-pay, you’re making quite a profit,” Beauregard said.

Recently, investigators “up and down the coast” have seen more cases of mail-order pharmaceuticals, including traffickers driving from Massachusetts and New York or flying in from Florida with “an extremely high number of pills with them,” he said. “It seems to be relatively easy to get pills out of Florida, although they seem to be cracking down recently.”

But most of the illegal drugs Beauregard encounters were prescribed in Maine.

“Our addicts are very good at deceiving people,” he said. “They know how to play the game. They communicate with each other, they know exactly what works, and how to get what drugs from which doctors.”

Some physicians don’t recognize the signs and symptoms of abuse as well as others, he said, although law enforcement works with them.

“It’s very difficult for doctors,” Beauregard said. “ Some of the addicts have legitimate pain and legitimate reasons for having the prescriptions. Some don’t.”

But the number of prescription drugs that end up on the street “ from the same doctors” means “there’s a hole somewhere,” Beauregard said.

‘An awful problem’

In December, Maine Attorney General William Schneider — a former drug prosecutor — told The Times Record, “Maine has developed an awful problem with prescription drug abuse, and that’s one of my very top priorities.”

Two months later, Gov. Paul Le- Page created a 17-member task force to address the “epidemic” of prescription drug abuse.

Nearly 1,400 Maine residents died from overdoses of pharmaceutical drugs in the last decade, and drugrelated deaths now exceed traffic fatalities in the state, according to the executive order creating the task force.

More than 500 babies born in Maine in 2010 suffered from opiate withdrawal and other effects of their mothers’ prescription drug abuse, according to LePage.

The task force will, among other objectives, create a system to alert doctors and pharmacists about arrests for drug violations, create an education program targeting the general public and health care professionals, and develop a statewide program to provide prescribers with drug crime information from law enforcement to help determine whether patients are legitimately in need of controlled substance prescriptions.

“We’re worried about the addiction problem, not just in Bath, but in the state of Maine,” Cielinski said Friday. “And not just because of addiction, but because it fuels other crimes.”

For example, many car thefts result from addicts searching for cash to purchase drugs, he said, and many petty thefts involve stealing other people’s drugs.

Melissa Fochesato, director of substance abuse prevention at Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick, said statistics show the local problem is in line with state figures, but she added, “ better than bad doesn’t make it good.”

A 2011 Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey showed that fewer high school students had used a prescription drug not prescribed to them than in 2009 — 15 percent in 2011 versus 19 percent in 2009, according to Fochesato, meaning numbers are decreasing.

Still, she noted, “the danger is that one-time use.”

bbrogan@timesrecord.com