Drug Overdose Deaths Continued to Increase in 2015

CONCORD, NH - As everyone has known for a while, drug overdose deaths have reached epidemic proportions in New Hampshire in recent years and the latest data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is showing that despite effective law enforcement efforts and the availability of Narcan to revive addicts who do overdose, deaths are still climbing.

For 2015, 420 people overdosed on drugs and died in New Hampshire, according to Kim Fallon, the state’s Chief Forensic Investigator. There are about 14 more cases from 2015 that are pending, waiting for toxicology reports which often take two to three months before pathologists at the ME’s office can review the data and determine the cause of death. The increase is about a 29 percent rise when compared to 2014, which was an even steeper jump over 2013.

Fentanyl, Fallon noted, was the prime overdose killer in 2015 – 157 deaths – with fentanyl and other drugs (75 deaths) and heroin and fentanyl (43) also recorded. Heroin overdoses, with no other drugs found in the toxicology report, came in at 32, down slightly from previous years. Thirty-five people in New Hampshire died from other drugs like cocaine, according to the latest data.

In places like Nashua, there were more than 140 overdoses in 2015, including 16 deaths. Concord, the state’s third largest city, has seen a huge spike in overdoses, heroin arrests, and deaths, too. For 2015, according data compiled by the police and fire departments in December, fatal overdoses were down slightly. However, the intentional misuse of medication and overdoses had risen an astonishing 470 percent since 2012.

Fallon said that so far for 2016, the ME’s office is looking at 60 cases that have pending toxicology reports and three people have been confirmed to have died of a drug overdose this year.

Final data for 2015 is expected to come in the next few weeks, according to Fallon.

Public officials on both the local and national level have been beside themselves trying to figure out what to do to combat the problem.

In Washington, DC, both U.S. Reps. Ann McLane Kuster, D-NH, and Frank Guinta, R-NH, have formed a Bipartisan Task Force to Combat the Heroin Epidemic, meeting with community leaders and stakeholders, and have pressed the president and their colleagues to fund efforts to tackle the problem. At the state level, legislative leaders and Gov. Maggie Hassan, D-Exeter, have agreed to a number of proposals that have come out of a bipartisan task force that spent a number of weeks holding hearings in Concord to address some of the opioid issues.