Ashley Brown, with Alliance for Substance Abuse Progress Bartholomew County, helps set up a display of shoes on the steps of Columbus City Hall before an International Overdose Awareness event in Columbus, Ind., Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021. The shoes were placed on the steps to represent the 111 individuals who overdosed in Bartholomew County. Mike Wolanin | The Republic
Local officials plan to move forward with a multi-disciplinary group that will review all local overdose deaths and suicides as Bartholomew County’s overdose crisis continues to deepen.
The group, which met for the first time on Nov. 16, has formally decided to form the Bartholomew County Suicide and Overdose Fatality Review (SOFR) Team and will begin to meet monthly, said Sherri Jewett, executive director of the Alliance for Substance Abuse Progress, or ASAP.
The team will include representatives from ASAP, Columbus Regional Health, the Bartholomew County Coroner’s Office, the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department, Council for Youth Development Bartholomew County, Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp., Centerstone, among more from other organizations, Jewett said.
The group has notified the Indiana Department of Health that they intend to implement a SOFR team in Bartholomew County, Jewett said.
The Indiana Department of Health works with local counties to establish and maintain SOFR teams and provide technical assistance.
More than 20 counties in Indiana now have SOFR teams, according to the Indiana Department of Health.
“The group has decided to implement a SOFR team in Bartholomew County, and we’re going to take a two-pronged approach,” Jewett said. “We’re going to look at all of the available data for the deaths that occurred in 2022. …We’ll be looking for consistent risk factors, consistent opportunities for intervention that were present. And then what we’ll do is take that information and develop an action plan to address those opportunities.”
“That’s the first step,” Jewett said. “We’re going to look at data from this year and see where those opportunities might be. And then going forward, we will review on a monthly basis any overdose deaths (and suicides) that have occurred.”
Bartholomew County Coroner Clayton Nolting previously said that his office will make its resources, analytics and data available to the review team.
Growing tragedy
The formation of the review team comes as drug overdose deaths in Bartholomew County continue to soar to their highest level on record.
As of Tuesday, there had been 37 confirmed overdose deaths in Bartholomew County — the highest total on record for a single year and putting the county on pace for roughly 40 overdose deaths this year — according to figures from the Bartholomew County Coroner’s Office.
By comparison, there were 33 overdose deaths last year and 31 in 2020. Fatal drug overdoses have risen in six of the previous seven years on record since the county recorded six overdose deaths in 2015.
Local officials have said that the increase in overdose deaths in recent years is largely being fueled by a more dangerous drug supply and the growing prevalence of fentanyl in Columbus.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is more potent than heroin but cheaper to produce and distribute.
The use of the drug has surged across the country, including Bartholomew County, causing officials to sound the alarm, with the drug now being increasingly laced with other drugs, including methamphetamine and counterfeit pills because it is cheaper and more powerful, leading to a surge in what officials believe are unintentional overdose deaths.
In late October, Nolting said “the overwhelming majority” of overdose deaths involve fentanyl, though most fatal overdoses involve multiple substances.
Fentanyl has “essentially replaced heroin” in Bartholomew County to the point that officials at Columbus Regional Health’s Treatment and Support Center, or TASC, rarely have patients who test positive for an opioid besides fentanyl, TASC Medical Director Dr. Kevin Terrell said in an earlier interview.
Officials fear that a continued influx of fentanyl in the community will continue to accelerate a crisis that has killed 190 people in Bartholomew County since 2015 — including 101 people since the beginning of 2020.
“Sadly, what we’re seeing here in Bartholomew County is the exact same trend as what has been identified nationwide with overdose deaths,” Jewett said.
Hope on the horizon
Preliminary government data released last month suggests that U.S. drug overdose deaths may have stopped rising, but many experts are urging caution, noting that past plateaus didn’t last, The Associated Press reported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released provisional data last month on what happened through the first six months of this year, according to wire reports.
Provisional data indicates U.S. overdose deaths fell three months in a row from April to June, according to wire reports. The CDC estimated there were about 107,600 overdose deaths for the 12-month period between July 2021 and June 2022. That’s 40 fewer than in the 2021 calendar year.
However, the numbers are not close to pre-pandemic levels yet, according to the AP. Nationally, the July 2021-June 2022 estimated number of deaths is still more than 5% higher than the number in July 2020-June 2021, and 28% higher than in July 2019-June 2020.
U.S. overdose death rates began steadily climbing in the 1990s driven by opioid painkillers, followed by waves of deaths led by other opioids including heroin and — most recently — fentanyl. Last year, more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses — the highest tally in U.S. history.
Some researchers think a spike occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns and other restrictions isolated those with drug addictions and made treatment harder to get.
Researchers have seen false plateaus before. Overdose deaths seemed to be leveling off for a couple of months in the spring of 2021 before rising again.
Local officials, for their part, are hopeful that the new review team will be able to identify any opportunities to intervene — and ultimately save lives.
“It’s not about anybody doing anything wrong,” Jewett said. “It’s just what interactions did this person have prior to this event? And is there a way to get more information out to try and make sure that those interactions are as positive as possible?”
