Drug overdose deaths in Bartholomew County have continued to outpace the number of deaths reported at the same point last year.
As of Wednesday afternoon, there had been 11 overdose deaths in the county this year and an additional two suspected overdose deaths that were still pending toxicology results, according to the Bartholomew County Coroner’s Office.
By comparison, there had been nine overdose deaths in the county at the same point last year.
Bartholomew County Coroner Clayton Nolting said there was “no known cause at this time” for what has been driving overdose deaths up this year.
“(The) main players are still methamphetamine and fentanyl,” 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.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the county was on pace for 20 overdose deaths this year.
The update from local officials comes a couple months 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 have speculated that 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.
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.
At least 228 people in Bartholomew County have died from drug overdoses since Jan. 1, 2015, according to county records.
