Over the past five years, the Maine Attorney General’s Office, led by Aaron Frey (D) has secured more than $260 million for the state through settlements with pharmaceutical companies accused of fueling the opioid epidemic.
While the office has played a central role in negotiating those settlements and helping guide how other entities spend their shares, details about how the attorney general’s own portion of the money has been used have remained largely out of public view.
Newly released data obtained by The Maine Monitor shows that the attorney general’s office has spent roughly $10 million of the $17.2 million it has received so far from the settlements. More than half of that amount — about $6 million — was directed to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.
The opioid settlement funds are intended to address the widespread harm caused by drug addiction in Maine, supporting prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery efforts. The settlement agreement’s outline approved uses for the money but leaves much of the oversight structure up to the states.
Under agreements signed between the attorney general’s office and local governments and school districts, Maine’s share of the settlement funds is divided three ways: 50 percent to the Maine Recovery Council, 30 percent to counties and municipalities known as direct share subdivisions, and 20 percent to the attorney general’s office.
The Recovery Council operates under detailed statutory requirements, including open meetings, annual public forums, and a publicly accessible spending dashboard. Direct share subdivisions are now required by law to submit annual spending reports to the attorney general’s office, which are then shared with the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee.
No comparable disclosure requirements apply to the attorney general’s office itself.
Although the office has said it plans to voluntarily share its spending data with the Maine Opioid Settlement Support Center at the University of Southern Maine for public dashboards expected to launch next year, the information obtained by The Maine Monitor represents the first detailed accounting of how the office has spent settlement funds since payments began.
Unlike the Recovery Council, which spent nearly two years developing a formal decision-making and grant process before distributing funds, the attorney general’s office does not operate under a defined procedure for allocating its settlement money, according to spokesperson Danna Hayes.
Hayes said the office prioritizes “well-vetted, evidence-based investments” and maintains flexibility to respond quickly to urgent funding gaps that cannot be addressed through slower, multi-party processes. She argued that this approach allows the office to address emergencies that other entities may not be able to handle in time.
Of the $6 million awarded to DHHS, roughly half was used to address a budget shortfall in the Office of Behavioral Health. According to the attorney general’s office, the $3 million transfer helped support treatment, recovery, and prevention services that were requested in the governor’s 2024 budget but not fully funded by the Legislature.
DHHS had sought $3.6 million annually for substance use disorder services. The Legislature ultimately approved $600,000 from the General Fund in state fiscal year 2024, with the remaining $3 million covered by the attorney general’s office. In fiscal year 2025, the full $3.6 million was funded through the General Fund.
According to DHHS, the funds supported services including recovery coaches, recovery residences, overdose prevention efforts, residential treatment programs, and the OPTIONS program, which connects individuals who use drugs with local services through county-based liaisons.
The attorney general’s office contends that the funding was not used to supplant existing resources, but rather to maintain critical programming in the face of federal budget reductions.
The remaining $3 million awarded to DHHS was used to double the number of OPTIONS liaisons statewide from 16 to 32.
Beyond DHHS, the attorney general’s office distributed approximately $2.2 million to other public agencies, including $1.2 million to the University of Southern Maine to establish the Maine Opioid Settlement Support Center, $1 million to MaineHousing for low-barrier shelters, and $61,000 to the University of Maine to support research tied to the Accidental Overdose Review Panel.
The office also awarded funds directly to nonprofit and community organizations, including $500,000 each to the Tessa Lee Libby Treatment Center in Washington and the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, $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.
Many of these awards were made outside of a formal grant process and without public meetings, a contrast to the Recovery Council’s approach. Hayes said the office lacks the infrastructure for open grant administration but emphasized that funding decisions were informed by prior public processes, legislative hearings, or established program performance.
Several of the organizations that received money from the attorney general’s office also sought or received funding from the Recovery Council, which awarded grants through its own competitive process.
In some cases, groups turned to the attorney general’s office after their requests were declined by the Recovery Council, which delayed funding decisions until its grant framework was fully established.
Advocates and researchers have repeatedly warned against using opioid settlement funds to fill budget gaps, citing the tobacco settlements of the 1990s, where much of the money was diverted away from public health efforts. The opioid settlement agreements themselves caution that funds should supplement, not replace, existing resources.
Despite those warnings, the attorney general’s office maintains that its spending decisions were necessary to sustain services and prevent program closures, particularly during periods of financial strain.
As Maine continues to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars from opioid settlements, questions remain about transparency and oversight, especially for the portion controlled directly by the attorney general’s office, which currently operates without the same public reporting requirements imposed on other recipients.
