Mike Wolanin | The Republic A fentanyl fact sheet and fentanyl test strips are displayed at the ASAP Hub in Columbus, Ind., Friday, July 22, 2022.
Overdose deaths in Bartholomew County have accelerated over the past couple months and are now outpacing the number of deaths reported at the same point last year.
As of Wednesday, there had been eight overdose deaths in the county this year, up from four deaths at the same point last year, according to the Bartholomew County Coroner’s Office.
Bartholomew County Coroner Clayton Nolting said he was unsure what was driving the increase, though most of the deaths this year have involved fentanyl, which is a potent synthetic opioid that is being increasingly pressed into counterfeit pills and cut into other drugs, often without the buyers’ knowledge.
“However, almost all cases have multiple drugs in the screen coming back positive,” Nolting said.
Despite the increase so far this year, the county still remains on pace to see far fewer overdose deaths than in 2022, when a record 39 people died from overdoses.
The update from local officials comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the number of U.S. fatal overdoses fell last year, The Associated Press reported.
About 107,500 people died of overdoses in the U.S. last year, including both American citizens and non-citizens who were in the country at the time they died, the CDC estimated. That’s down 3% from 2022, when there were an estimated 111,000 such deaths, the agency said.
Indiana saw an estimated 18% decline in overdose deaths in 2023, the second-highest decline in the nation, according to the provisional CDC data.
Agency officials noted the data is provisional and could change after more analysis, but that they still expect a drop when the final counts are in, according to wire reports. It would be only the second annual decline since the current national drug death epidemic began more than three decades ago.
Bartholomew County saw a steeper decline in overdose deaths last year than the state and nation, with deaths falling from a record 39 in 2022 to 25 in 2023, a 36% decline and the lowest annual total since 2019.
Local officials largely attributed the steeper local decline in fatal overdoses to community-wide efforts to combat substance abuse and harm-reduction measures, including the availability of naloxone, which is a nasal spray that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose that is often sold under the brand name Narcan.
“My view is that the reductions in overdoses were from widespread naloxone availability and use,” said Dr. Kevin Terrell, medical director at Columbus Regional Health’s Treatment and Support Center, or TASC. “I don’t have any reason to believe that the decrease in overdose deaths was a result of fewer people using drugs. The number of new patients we see every week who struggle with opioid addiction continues to increase, as it has since we opened in July 2019.”
Experts have reacted cautiously to the decline in U.S. overdose deaths, according to wire reports. One described the decline as relatively small, and said it should be thought more as part of a leveling off than a decrease. Another noted that the last time a decline occurred — in 2018 — drug deaths shot up in the years that followed.
It’s also too soon to know what spurred the decline, experts told the AP. Explanations could include shifts in the drug supply, expansion of overdose prevention and addiction treatment, and the grim possibility that the epidemic has killed so many that now there are basically fewer people to kill.
The drug overdose epidemic, which has killed more than 1 million people since 1999, has had many ripple effects, according to wire reports. For example, a study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry estimated that more than 321,000 U.S. children lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose from 2011 to 2021.
Prescription painkillers once drove the nation’s overdose epidemic, but they were supplanted years ago by heroin and more recently by illegal fentanyl. The dangerously powerful opioid was developed to treat intense pain from ailments like cancer but has increasingly been mixed with other drugs in the illicit drug supply.
For years, fentanyl was frequently injected, but increasingly it’s being smoked or mixed into counterfeit pills, according to wire reports.
A study published last month found that law enforcement seizures of pills containing fentanyl are rising dramatically, jumping from 44 million in 2022 to more than 115 million last year.
In the Midwest, the number of fentanyl-laced pills seized by law enforcement surged from 2,299 pills in 2017 to nearly 7.7 million in 2023, according to the study’s results.
Local officials, for their part, expressed concern about the increase in overdose deaths so far this year but said they are continuing to step up efforts to combat the issue in Bartholomew County.
“We’re definitely concerned about (the increase in overdose deaths),” said Alliance for Substance Abuse Progress Executive Director Sherri Jewett. “Once again, we know it has a lot to do with fentanyl and its continued introduction into the illicit drug supply within the community. We continue to pass out Narcan. We continue with the (fentanyl) test strips that are available to people. But it’s fentanyl that is really causing the ongoing issue.”
