Statewide data from the FBI casts doubt on Gov. Paul LePage’s recent claim that “90-plus percent” of drug dealers arrested in Maine are black or Hispanic.

LePage reportedly said at a town hall forum in North Berwick last week that he kept a three-ring binder on “every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state.” LePage went on to say that “90-plus percent of those pictures in my book … are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Conn., the Bronx and Brooklyn.”

According to data provided by the FBI, only 15 percent of total drug-trafficking and manufacturing arrests in 2014 — the most recent data — were black adults. The other 85 percent were white adults. 

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports program began collecting Hispanic arrest data in 2013, but that data is “limited and not a representation of all arrests,” so it wasn’t provided, authorities said.

Before that, Hispanic arrests were included in either white or black numbers, depending on the agency, said Stephen G. Fischer Jr., chief of multimedia productions at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Informational Services, which provided the data to the Sun Journal.

Of those 2014 arrests, 36 percent were black adults making or selling opium or cocaine and their derivatives, such as morphine and heroin, and nearly two-thirds were white.

Of the adults arrested for selling or making synthetic narcotics in 2014, which “can cause true drug addiction” such as Demerol and methadone, 8 percent were black and 91 percent were white, according to the FBI.

In Maine, the synthetic narcotic fentanyl, used as a heroin additive, has been believed responsible for many fatal overdoses.

The racial patterns that appeared in 2014 FBI data for drug sales and manufacturing can be found in earlier years as well.

In 2013, 12 percent of adults arrested for selling and making drugs in Maine were black; 88 percent were white. The number of white adults arrested for selling and making opium- or cocaine-based drugs was more than twice that of blacks.

In 2012, 8 percent of adults arrested for selling and making drugs were black; 91 percent were white.

At a town hall meeting in January in Bridgton, LePage made a thinly veiled reference to black men from outside Maine being primarily responsible for bringing drugs into the state.

At the meeting, according to published reports, LePage said those responsible for Maine’s heroin pipeline were “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty — these types of guys — they come from Connecticut and New York.” In addition to delivering drugs, “half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road,” he said.

In Lewiston, interim Police Chief Brian O’Malley told the Sun Journal equal numbers of blacks and whites were arrested in 2013-15 for drug-trafficking.

In Auburn, arrests of white suspects outnumbered those of blacks for drug-trafficking since the beginning of the year and during the same seven-month period last year.

LePage repeated the alleged link as recently as Monday at a Boston conference of New England governors. There, he said that while whites were largely responsible for methamphetamine sales and manufacturing, blacks and Hispanics composed the bulk of opioid traffickers in Maine. He expanded his earlier remarks Monday to include the Massachusetts’ cities of Lowell and Lawrence as origination points for heroin and fentanyl. 

LePage has publicly rejected the notion that he is racist and says he “even brought a black person into my family.”

The Sun Journal sought unsuccessfully to reach the governor’s spokeswoman by phone and email for comment.

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