Maine has become a “wholesale distribution hub” for drug dealers in the Northeast, bringing a slew of crime to the rural state, a police chief told Fox News Digital.

The New England state, typically known for its rugged coastline and beautiful fall foliage, has gradually become filled with illicit drugs as more gangs establish themselves in the area. Chris Martin, police chief of the Brewer Police Department in Maine, told Fox News Digital that his area has turned into a distribution hub for illegal drugs.

“What we’ve seen in the past, particularly four years, is that our area has turned into a wholesale distribution hub. So, we have kilo quantities available of fentanyl and methamphetamine and cocaine. And that’s a dramatic market shift that we hadn’t seen 10, 20 years ago. So the supply has increased readily,” Martin said.

Martin, who also serves as the town’s public safety director, said the rise in illegal drugs has also brought a rise in crime. Since it’s often costly to purchase street drugs, Martin said that individuals are turning to crime in order to fund their addiction.

Jesse Harvey, the founder of the Church of Safe Injection, shows some volunteers what he hands out to clients from his mobile needle exchange near Kennedy Park in Lewiston on Wednesday, October 24, 2018. Harvey provides clients a safe place to dispose of used needles, Naloxone, clean needles and other items that are seen as harm reduction tools in the recovery community.  (Brianna Soukup/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

Republican State Sen. Brad Farrin, who lost his 26-year-old daughter to a drug overdose, proposed a bill in 2023 that would have reclassified the trafficking of fentanyl to a Class A felony. The bill was voted down, primarily by Democrats.

Republican Bobby Charles, who is running for Maine governor and served in the former Bush administration as the Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told Fox News Digital the state needs to get more serious about confronting this epidemic.

“I have never seen anything like what we’re experiencing here in Maine. This state, when I grew up in this state, might have had five overdoses in the entire state. Last year, this state had 10,000 overdoses, and many of them fatal,” Charles said. “I sit down beside people and they quietly lean over to me and say, this happened to me two days ago, I lost my daughter to fentanyl two years ago…Do you know what that devastation is like? It’s huge and it is inexcusable. It is immoral and it has to be stopped.”

A bag of pills that a person dropped off in the box at the drug take back station in the Back Bay parking lot. The station was one of several locations throughout the Portland area for National Prescription Drug Take Back Day. (Brianna Soukup/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

Charles has placed the blame squarely on statewide Democrats and Mills, who, in his view, haven’t done much to reduce the flow of illegal drugs into Maine.

“The traffickers have come into this state, and because the Democrats have cut the guts out of law enforcement, they have, in my opinion, betrayed them. There isn’t a single situation in which a prosecutor feels like he has enough money or has the ability to prosecute these cases. They’ve been abandoned, OK?” Charles said.

“The bottom line is they’re trying to turn Maine into inner city Chicago or the Badlands of Philly. And I am not going to stand for it. Mainers are not going to stand for.”

Fox News Digital reached out to Mills’ office for comment.