Over the past five years, the attorney general’s office, with Aaron Frey at the helm, has secured for Maine more than $260 million in settlements with major pharmaceutical companies accused of “supercharging” the opioid epidemic.

It has overseen the settlements’ distribution and contributed to efforts to help a state council and local governments spend their shares deliberately and transparently.

Yet information about how the attorney general’s office — which is receiving a fifth of Maine’s funds — is itself making spending decisions has been limited.

Data obtained by The Maine Monitor and published publicly here for the first time shows that the AG’s office has spent $10 million of the $17.2 million it has received so far, with more than half going to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The money is intended to address the harms caused by a drug epidemic that has claimed thousands of lives in Maine by supporting prevention and harm reduction efforts and treatment and recovery programs. The settlements include a 15-page document detailing approved uses for the money but leave most of the decisions about oversight up to the states.

Maine’s share is split three ways, per agreements the AG’s office signed with local governments and school districts that were party to the case behind the settlements: 50 percent to the Maine Recovery Council, 30 percent to towns and counties known as direct share subdivisions, and 20 percent to the AG’s office.

The settlement agreements and state statute provide specific guidelines for the 15-member Recovery Council’s spending process, requiring open meetings, annual public forums and a public dashboard.

The AG’s office is required to update the legislature on the council’s spending annually. A law passed earlier this year will also require the 39 direct share subdivisions to submit annual spending reports to the AG’s office, which will share them with the legislature’s committee on health and human services.

There are no similar disclosure requirements for the AG’s office.

While the AG’s office has said it will share its spending data with the Maine Opioid Settlement Support (MOSS) Center at the University of Southern Maine for dashboards that will be published in the new year, the agency has so far released limited information about its spending. The data obtained by The Monitor is the first detailed disclosure of the AG’s office’s spending in the three years since payments began.

Unlike the Recovery Council, which labored over how to structure its decision-making and distribution process for nearly two years before getting any money out the door, the AG’s office does not have specific procedures in place for determining how to spend its opioid settlement money, the office said through a spokesperson, Danna Hayes.

“The Attorney General is committed to ensuring that settlement funds are used for well-vetted, evidence-based investments,” Hayes said. “Due to the unique nature of the Office, the Attorney General can quickly and creatively be responsive to state and community officials to consider urgent funding gaps or emergency needs not able to be filled by other settlement fund decision-makers.”

The Recovery Council and local governments are expected to “have a procedure that requires buy-in from multiple parties (and) extended deliberations and processes,” she added. That means that “sometimes emergencies have sprung up that have required quicker action than an organization like the Maine Recovery Council or a county might be able to achieve.”

Still, Hayes said the office is dedicated to transparency, as evidenced by its plan to voluntarily share its data with the MOSS Center.

Of the $6 million the attorney general’s office awarded to DHHS, half went to address a budget shortfall in the Office of Behavioral Health. Data from the AG’s office states the funding was “transferred to OBH to assist it with funding it requested from the Legislature in its budget request of 2024 for treatment, recovery, and prevention programs and services, which request was not fully funded.”

DHHS requested $3.6 million annually in the governor’s budget for substance use disorder services, department spokesperson Lindsay Hammes said. “The Legislature agreed to meet this need in SFY24 with $0.6M from the General Fund (GF) and the $3M from the Office of the Attorney General and in SFY25 with $3.6M from the GF.”

According to a contract between the AG’s office and DHHS signed in July 2023, “The need for various program initiatives designed to combat substance use disorder in Maine has surpassed the funding levels currently available” in the state fiscal year that ran from July 2023 to June 2024. The one-time infusion was awarded “in recognition of the financial challenges.”

“Services included recovery coaches, recovery residences, overdose prevention, residential treatment, and the OPTIONS program,” Hammes said.

These include medically managed withdrawal and other residential treatment programs, recovery community centers and access to recovery coaches that provide peer-to-peer support, she said.

Hammes added, “OBH does not directly operate residential treatment and recovery services but contracts with community-based providers to provide funding that supports access to services across the behavioral health treatment continuum.”

Since payments began several years ago, advocates and researchers have warned against repeating the mistakes of the tobacco settlements from nearly 30 years ago, in which funds were misappropriated and very little was spent on anti-smoking efforts.

The settlement agreements also caution against this, saying that the funds “shall be used solely to supplement and strengthen, rather than supplant, resources.” In other words, the money should be spent expanding or creating new programs rather than as a slush fund to plug budget holes.

The AG’s office, in a statement from Hayes, argued that the $3 million to DHHS was not a case of dipping into the settlement funds in order to save money elsewhere, but instead an effort to ensure “critical programming to address substance use disorder could continue,” particularly in the face of federal budget cuts.

The AG’s office only made the decision to provide OBH with funding after the legislature declined to fully fund DHHS’s request, she said.

The other $3 million given to DHHS went toward doubling the number of OPTIONS liaisons from 16 to 32. Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach Naloxone and Safety, or OPTIONS, was launched in 2020 as a joint initiative between OBH and other state agencies. It places at least one liaison in each county who works with community partners and law enforcement agencies to conduct outreach and help connect people who use drugs to local resources.

Additionally, the AG’s office awarded another $2.2 million to other public agencies. That included $1.2 million to the University of Southern Maine to start the MOSS Center, $1 million to MaineHousing to support low-barrier shelters and $61,000 to the University of Maine, to fund the researcher who works on the Accidental Overdose Review Panel within the AG’s office.

The MOSS Center is designed to help local governments, many of which have struggled to determine where their money should go and the logistics of distributing it, spend their funds appropriately and to maintain data on where it’s going and its impact.

So far, the center has created guides, grant application templates and evaluation rubrics and has fulfilled more than 100 requests for assistance from local officials, center director Dr. Lindsey Smith said. Smith expects the spending data dashboards to go live in February or March of next year.

The contract with USM says that the AG’s office will pay out a total of $2.4 million over five years to support the center.

Other spending included $500,000 to the Tessa Lee Libby Treatment Center, known as Tessa’s House, in Washington, in November 2025 and $500,000 to the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians in March 2025, which used the money to purchase three properties that will be used for residential treatment and recovery services. The office also gave $400,000 to Milestone Recovery in Portland, $240,000 to the Maine Medical Association’s 1000 Lives Campaign and $150,000 to the Pinetree Institute in York County.

Eliot-based Pinetree Institute began working on what executive director Larry McCullough called a “coordinated response” to opioid use in 2019 with Kennebunk and Kennebunkport. A couple of years ago, the nonprofit wanted to expand those efforts to include the entire county. Gordon Smith, the state director of opioid response, introduced the institute’s leaders to Frey to discuss financial support.

Frey’s office gave the institute two awards from the settlement funds: the first, in 2024, to develop the York County Recovery Coalition, and the second this year, to implement the Recovery Ready York County Initiative. The coalition and initiative’s goals are to provide community support for people in early recovery, including facilitating coordination between partners to ensure people have the resources they need to support their recovery, like housing, employment and transportation, McCullough said.

Unlike the Recovery Council and several direct share subdivisions, the AG’s office did not award these funds through a formal grant process or in open meetings.

“In contrast to the other recipients of settlement funds, direct public input is not feasible because the Office does not have a grant application or administration structure,” Hayes said. “However, the Attorney General strongly believes these limited funds obtained through settlements should be directed with public input and, as such, funds have been designated to efforts that have previously received public input as part of another process, such as a legislative public hearing, Maine Recovery Council deliberations, or an established program with demonstrated success.”

Most of the organizations that received money from the AG’s office have also made requests to the Recovery Council.

The council awarded Milestone Recovery just under $308,000 for its low-barrier shelter program and gave $1 million to Tessa’s House, a detoxification and treatment center for women that opened earlier this year.

Funds for Tessa’s House from both the AG’s office and the Recovery Council were for start-up costs for the program, including repairs and renovations of the Knox County facility.

Milestone Recovery established its first detoxification program in the late 1960s and opened its latest facility on Andover Road in Portland last year. The nonprofit sought funding from the AG’s office to “protect and strengthen access to medically managed withdrawal at Andover Road at a time when the program was still relatively new and financially fragile,” co-executive directors Jayme Villanueva and Jeff Grossman said in an email.

The 24/7 program serves many uninsured and underinsured adults, they said, and like many other similar programs, has “high staffing requirements in a challenging reimbursement environment.”

The one-time funding in November 2024 helped stabilize the 30-bed residential detox program and establish a new 30-day outpatient program at the same location, Villanueva and Grossman said.

In at least one instance, an organization approached the AG’s office because the Recovery Council denied their request.

Dr. Erik Steele, the 1000 Lives Campaign chair and former Maine Medical Association president, originally approached the Recovery Council in April of 2024 with a request to fund a full-time project manager for two years. But most of the council said they were not ready to vote on any proposals without a grant process in place, and declined the campaign’s request.

A month earlier, the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future's senior advisor on housing policy, Greg Payne, wrote a memo to the council about a nearly $4 million funding gap for Maine’s low-barrier shelters, which can serve up to 234 people who are generally “those with the greatest challenges, including substance use disorder, acute mental illness and serious physical health problems.”

Payne said his office was in talks with the AG’s office about getting some of their settlement funds but also needed help from the Recovery Council. As with the 1000 Lives Campaign, the council declined to take any action. 

“For administrative efficiency,” the award from the AG’s office went through MaineHousing, which disbursed the funds to the state’s privately owned low-barrier shelters, MaineHousing spokesperson Scott Thistle said in an email.

“At the time, many shelters were on the brink of fiscal collapse – most notably Hope House in Bangor, which had already decided to close before this coordinated effort reversed that decision,” he said.

The Recovery Council separately funded several shelters, including Milestone’s, through its grant process at the end of 2024.

After the April meeting, the 1000 Lives Campaign turned to the AG’s office for help, Maine Medical Association executive director Andrew MacLean said. The goal of the campaign is to reduce opioid-related deaths over five years by working directly with health care providers to improve opioid use disorder treatment.

“Dr. Steele and I personally approached Attorney General Frey with the funding request during a regular dialogue about our mutual interest in and collaboration about the OUD (opioid use disorder) response,” MacLean said.

The agreement with the AG’s office was finalized last fall and Christy McGlynn was hired in January to serve as project manager.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.