Why?
Because opioids when combined with alcohol shuts off your brain being able to keep you breathing while you are asleep so you just die!
So, if you see a friend or relative drinking alcohol along with an opioid you have to keep them awake to keep them alive.
This was from "President Bill Clinton" on the Conan Show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. His Foundation (and his wife's) is presently trying to prevent opioid deaths nationwide and worldwide.
Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever - The New York ...
https://www.nytimes.com/.../2017/.../opioid-epidemic-drug-overdose-deaths-are-rising-f...
Jun 5, 2017 - 59,000 to 65,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in ... opioid epidemic, we estimate overdose deaths increased by more than 25 percent in 2016. ... There were so many last year, Mr. Guenther said, that on three ...
UPDATE The first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths shows roughly 64,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016.
AKRON, Ohio — Drug overdose deaths in 2016 most
likely exceeded 59,000, the largest annual jump ever recorded in the
United States, according to preliminary data compiled by The New York
Times.
The death count is the latest consequence of an
escalating public health crisis: opioid addiction, now made more deadly
by an influx of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and similar drugs. Drug
overdoses are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50.
Although the data is preliminary, the Times’s
best estimate is that deaths rose 19 percent over the 52,404 recorded in
2015. And all evidence suggests the problem has continued to worsen in
2017.
Because drug deaths take a long time to certify, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention will not be able to calculate final numbers until
December. The Times compiled estimates for 2016 from hundreds of state
health departments and county coroners and medical examiners. Together
they represent data from states and counties that accounted for 76
percent of overdose deaths in 2015. They are a first look at the extent
of the drug overdose epidemic last year, a detailed accounting of a
modern plague.
The initial data points to large increases in
drug overdose deaths in states along the East Coast, particularly
Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania and Maine. In Ohio, which filed a lawsuit
last week accusing five drug companies of abetting the opioid epidemic,
we estimate overdose deaths increased by more than 25 percent in 2016.
“Heroin is the devil’s drug, man. It is,” Cliff
Parker said, sitting on a bench in Grace Park in Akron. Mr. Parker, 24,
graduated from high school not too far from here, in nearby Copley,
where he was a multisport athlete. In his senior year, he was a varsity
wrestler and earned a scholarship to the University of Akron. Like his
friends and teammates, he started using prescription painkillers at
parties. It was fun, he said. By the time it stopped being fun, it was
too late. Pills soon turned to heroin, and his life began slipping away
from him.
Mr. Parker’s story is familiar in the Akron
area. From a distance, it would be easy to paint Akron — “Rubber Capital
of the World” — as a stereotypical example of Rust Belt decay. But that’s far
from a complete picture. While manufacturing jobs have declined and the
recovery from the 2008 recession has been slow, unemployment in Summit
County, where Akron sits, is roughly in line with the United States as a
whole. The Goodyear factories have been retooled into technology
centers for research and polymer science. The city has begun to rebuild. But deaths from drug overdose here have skyrocketed.
In 2016, Summit County had 312 drug deaths,
according to Gary Guenther, the county medical examiner’s chief
investigator — a 46 percent increase from 2015 and more than triple the
99 cases that went through the medical examiner’s office just two years
before. There were so many last year, Mr. Guenther said, that on three
separate occasions the county had to request refrigerated trailers to
store the bodies because they’d run out of space in the morgue.
It’s not unique to Akron. Coroners’ offices throughout the state are being overwhelmed.
Drug overdose deaths in six Ohio counties, 2010 to 2017
Totals for 2017 assume that overdose deaths continue at the same rate through the remainder of the year.
Source: Butler County Coroner’s Office;
Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office; Hamilton County Coroner;
Montgomery County Alcohol, Drug Addiction & Mental Health Service;
Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office; Summit County Department of the
Medical Examiner
In some Ohio counties, deaths from heroin have
virtually disappeared. Instead, the culprit is fentanyl or one of its
many analogues. In Montgomery County, home to Dayton, of the 100 drug
overdose deaths recorded in January and February, only three people
tested positive for heroin; 99 tested positive for fentanyl or an
analogue.
Fentanyl isn’t new. But over the past three years, it has been popping up in drug seizures across the country.
Drug seizures containing fentanyl
Source: D.E.A. National Forensic Laboratory Information System
Most of the time, it’s sold on the street as heroin, or drug traffickers use it to make cheap counterfeit prescription opioids. Fentanyls are showing up in cocaine as well, contributing to an increase in cocaine-related overdoses.
The most deadly of the fentanyl analogues is carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer 5,000 times stronger than heroin. An amount smaller than a few grains of salt can be a lethal dose.
“July 5th, 2016 — that’s the day carfentanil
hit the streets of Akron,” said Capt. Michael Shearer, the commander of
the Narcotics Unit for the Akron Police Department. On that day, 17
people overdosed and one person died in a span of nine hours. Over the
next six months, the county medical examiner recorded 140 overdose
deaths of people testing positive for carfentanil. Just three years
earlier, there were fewer than a hundred drug overdose deaths of any
kind for the entire year.
This exponential growth in overdose deaths in
2016 didn't extend to all parts of the country. In some states in the
western half of the U.S., our data suggests deaths may have leveled off
or even declined. According to Dr. Dan Ciccarone,
a professor of family and community medicine at the University of
California, San Francisco, and an expert in heroin use in the United
States, this geographic variation may reflect a historical divide in the
nation’s heroin market between the powdered heroin generally found east of the Mississippi River and the Mexican black tar heroin found to the west.
This divide may have kept deaths down in the
West for now, but according to Dr. Ciccarone, there is little evidence
of differences in the severity of opioid addiction or heroin use. If
drug traffickers begin to shift production and distribution in the West
from black tar to powdered heroin in large quantities, fentanyl will
most likely come along with it, and deaths will rise.
Drug overdose deaths in Philadelphia and San Francisco
Drug overdose deaths since
1980 have surged in Philadelphia despite a shrinking population; most
heroin there is powdered. They have remained relatively flat in San
Francisco, where most heroin is black tar.
Source: C.D.C. WONDER
First responders are finding that, with fentanyl and carfentanil, the overdoses can be so severe that multiple doses of naloxone
— the anti-overdose medication that often goes by the brand name Narcan
— are needed to pull people out. In Warren County in Ohio, Doyle Burke,
the chief investigator at the county coroner’s office, has been
watching the number of drug deaths rise as the effectiveness of Narcan
falls. “E.M.S. crews are hitting them with 12, 13, 14 hits of Narcan
with no effect,” said Mr. Burke, likening a shot of Narcan to “a squirt
gun in a house fire.”
Early data from 2017 suggests that drug overdose
deaths will continue to rise this year. It’s the only aspect of
American health, said Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the
C.D.C., that is getting significantly worse. Over two million Americans are estimated to be dependent on opioids, and an additional 95 million used prescription painkillers
in the past year — more than used tobacco. “This epidemic, it’s got no
face,” said Chris Eisele, the president of the Warren County Fire
Chiefs’ Association and fire chief of Deerfield Township. The Narcotics
Anonymous meetings here are populated by lawyers, accountants, young
adults and teenagers who described comfortable middle-class upbringings.
Back in Akron, Mr. Parker has been clean for
seven months, though he is still living on the streets. The ground of
the park is littered with discarded needles, and many among the homeless
here are current or former heroin users. Like most recovering from
addiction, Mr. Parker needed several tries to get clean — six, by his
count. The severity of opioid withdrawal means users rarely get clean
unless they are determined and have treatment readily available. “No one
wants their family to find them face down with a needle in their arm,”
Mr. Parker said. “But no one stops until they’re ready.”
About the data
Our count of drug overdoses for 2016 is an
estimate. A precise number of drug overdose deaths will not be available
until December.
As the chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch of the National Center for Health Statistics at the C.D.C., Robert Anderson
oversees the collection and codification of the nation’s mortality
data. He noted that toxicology results, which are necessary to assign a
cause of death, can take three to six months or longer. “It’s
frustrating, because we really do want to track this stuff,” he said,
describing how timely data on cause of death would let public health
workers allocate resources in the right places.
To come up with our count, we contacted state
health departments in all 50 states, in addition to the District of
Columbia, asking for their statistics on drug overdose deaths among
residents. In states that didn't have numbers available, we turned to
county medical examiners and coroners’ offices. In some cases, partial
results were extrapolated through the end of the year to get estimates
for 2016.
While noting the difficulty of making
predictions, Mr. Anderson reviewed The Times’s estimates and said they
seemed reasonable. The overdose death rate reported by the N.C.H.S. provisional estimates
for the first half of 2016 would imply a total of 59,779 overdose
deaths, if the death rate remains flat through the second half of the
year. Based on our reporting, we believe this rate increased.
While the process in each state varies slightly,
death certificates are usually first filled out by a coroner, medical
examiner or attending physician. These death certificates are then
collected by state health departments and sent to the N.C.H.S., which
assigns what’s called an ICD-10 code to each death. This code specifies
the underlying cause of death, and it’s what determines whether a death
is classified as a drug overdose.
Sometimes, the cases are straightforward; other times, it’s not so easy. The people in charge of coding each death — called nosologists
— have to differentiate between deaths due to drug overdose and those
due to the long-term effects of drug abuse, which get a different code.
(There were 2,573 such deaths in 2015.) When alcohol and drugs are both
present, they must specify which of the two was the underlying cause. If
it’s alcohol, it’s not a “drug overdose” under the commonly used
definition. Ideally, every medical examiner, coroner and attending
physician would fill out death certificates with perfect consistency,
but there are often variations from jurisdiction to jurisdiction that
can introduce inconsistencies to the data.
These inconsistencies are part of the reason
there is a delay in drug death reporting, and among the reasons we can
still only estimate the number of drug overdoses in 2016. Since we
compiled our data from state health departments and county coroners and
medical examiners directly, the deaths have not yet been assigned ICD-10
codes by the N.C.H.S. — that is, the official underlying cause of death
has not yet been categorized. In addition, the mortality data in
official statistics focuses on deaths among residents. But county
coroners typically count up whichever deaths come through their office,
regardless of residency. When there were large discrepancies between the
2015 counts from the C.D.C. and the state or county, we used the
percent change from 2015 to calculate our 2016 estimate.
We can say with confidence that drug deaths rose
a great deal in 2016, but it is hard to say precisely how many died or
in which places drug deaths rose most steeply. Because of the delay
associated with toxicology reports and inconsistencies in the reported
data, our exact estimate — 62,497 total drug overdose deaths — could
vary from the true number by several thousand.
Sources
| State | 2015 Deaths | 2016 estimate based on data from... |
|---|---|---|
| Alaska | 122 | |
| Alabama | 736 |
Alabama Center for Health Statistics
|
| Arkansas | 392 |
Benton County coroner's office
|
| Arizona | 1,274 |
Arizona Department of Health Services; medical examiners covering Maricopa and Pima counties
|
| California | 4,659 |
Coroners and medical examiners covering Fresno, Kern, Riverside,
San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Barbara and Santa Clara
counties
|
| Colorado | 869 |
Colorado Center for Health and Environmental Data
|
| Connecticut | 800 |
Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
|
| Washington, D.C. | 125 | |
| Delaware | 198 | |
| Florida | 3,228 |
Medical examiners covering Brevard, Broward, Clay, Columbia,
DeSoto, Duval, Escambia, Glades, Hamilton, Hardee, Hendry, Highlands,
Hillsborough, Lee, Manatee, Miami-Dade, Nassau, Okaloosa, Orange,
Osceola, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Santa Rosa, Sarasota,
Seminole, Volusia and Walton counties
|
| Georgia | 1,302 |
Coroners and medical examiners covering Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties
|
| Hawaii | 169 |
City and County of Honolulu Department of the Medical Examiner
|
| Iowa | 309 |
Iowa Department of Public Health
|
| Idaho | 218 |
|
| Illinois | 1,835 | |
| Indiana | 1,245 |
Indiana State Department of Health
|
| Kansas | 329 |
|
| Kentucky | 1,273 |
Kentucky Death Certificate Database, Kentucky Office of Vital Statistics
|
| Louisiana | 861 |
Louisiana Department of Health
|
| Massachusetts | 1,724 | |
| Maryland | 1,285 | |
| Maine | 269 | |
| Michigan | 1,980 |
Medical examiners covering Barry, Eaton, Ingham, Ionia, Isabella,
Kent, Livingston, Macomb, Montcalm, Oakland, Shiawassee and Wayne
counties
|
| Minnesota | 581 |
Coroners and medical examiners covering Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey and Scott counties
|
| Missouri | 1,066 |
Coroners and medical examiners covering Jackson and St. Louis counties, and the city of St. Louis
|
| Mississippi | 351 |
Pearl River County coroner's office
|
| Montana | 138 |
Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services
|
| North Carolina | 1,567 |
North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
|
| North Dakota | 61 |
North Dakota State Forensic Examiner's Office
|
| Nebraska | 126 |
Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services
|
| New Hampshire | 422 | |
| New Jersey | 1,454 |
Medical examiners covering Camden, Gloucester and Salem counties
|
| New Mexico | 501 |
|
| Nevada | 619 |
Coroners covering Clark and Washoe counties
|
| New York | 2,754 | |
| Ohio | 3,310 |
Coroners covering Brown, Butler, Clark, Clermont, Clinton,
Cuyahoga, Franklin, Greene, Hamilton, Lake, Lawrence, Lorain, Mahoning,
Montgomery, Richland, Ross, Scioto, Stark, Summit, Trumbull and Warren
counties
|
| Oklahoma | 725 |
Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
|
| Oregon | 505 |
|
| Pennsylvania | 3,264 |
Overdose Free PA; coroners and medical examiners covering
Allegheny, Bucks, Dauphin, Delaware, Erie, Lackawanna, Lancaster,
Lehigh, Luzerne, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia and York counties
|
| Rhode Island | 310 | |
| South Carolina | 761 |
Coroners and medical examiners covering Charleston, Greenville, Horry and Spartanburg counties
|
| South Dakota | 65 |
South Dakota Department of Health
|
| Tennessee | 1,457 |
Coroners and medical examiners covering Davidson, Hamilton and Shelby counties
|
| Texas | 2,588 |
Center for Health Statistics, Texas Department of State Health Services
|
| Utah | 646 | |
| Virginia | 1,039 | |
| Vermont | 99 | |
| Washington | 1,094 |
Washington Department of Health
|
| Wisconsin | 878 |
Wisconsin Department of Health Services
|
| West Virginia | 725 |
West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources
|
| Wyoming | 96 |
|
In all cases, “cause of death” refers to what the National Center for Health Statistics
classifies as the underlying, rather than the immediate, cause of
death. Example: For a person who dies from an infection because of
H.I.V., while the infection might be the immediate cause of the person’s
death, the underlying cause would be H.I.V.
Deaths from car crashes include all deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents according to the N.C.H.S. Deaths from guns include homicides, suicides and accidental deaths from firearms, in addition to firearm deaths of undetermined intent. It excludes firearm deaths caused by legal intervention. Deaths from drug overdoses excludes deaths caused by substance use disorder or withdrawal, which accounted for an additional 2,573 deaths in 2015.
Definitions for causes of death can change slightly with each revision of the International Classification of Diseases. Where applicable, deaths counted under earlier editions of the I.C.D. were adjusted to correct for this.
Deaths from car crashes include all deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents according to the N.C.H.S. Deaths from guns include homicides, suicides and accidental deaths from firearms, in addition to firearm deaths of undetermined intent. It excludes firearm deaths caused by legal intervention. Deaths from drug overdoses excludes deaths caused by substance use disorder or withdrawal, which accounted for an additional 2,573 deaths in 2015.
Definitions for causes of death can change slightly with each revision of the International Classification of Diseases. Where applicable, deaths counted under earlier editions of the I.C.D. were adjusted to correct for this.
Additional reporting by Kevin Quealy
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