Butler County overdose deaths above recent years, but not near record

While Ohio overall may hit a record for accidental overdoses, that will not be the case for Butler County.

Butler County’s 2020 drug overdose increase rise from the two prior years does not seem to be caused by the coronavirus pandemic, because the largest month for overdoses was February, with 21, before the pandemic arrived here, said Martin Schneider, administrator for the coroner’s office.

Officials have been surprised to see suicides were down from prior years. They had expected the economic downturn would lead to more suicides. But through Tuesday, there were 38 known or suspected suicides, below the 47 in 2019 and 42 in 2018.

One thing that brought down overdoses in recent years was creation of quick-response teams created in some cities like Middletown, Hamilton, Fairfield and Oxford, as well as the sheriff’s office. Those teams meet with addicts after overdoses to try to connect them with treatment.

“We are running some quick-response teams out in the community,” said Scott Rasmus, executive director of the county Mental Health & Addiction Recovery Services Board. “Obviously, the pandemic negatively affected those a little bit, obviously, in determining a way to provide those in a safe environment during covid.”

He credited increased distribution of Narcan, a drug that can revive people from heroin overdoses, as a factor that had lowered overdose rates in recent years. But one factor leading to increased deaths is increased use of methamphetamines, whose overdoses are not helped by Narcan.

Since Dr. Lisa Mannix became coroner in 2012, overdoses climbed steadily through 2017, before dipping in 2018 and ‘19.

“There’s many possible reasons why we saw the downward trend through ‘18 and ‘19,” Schneider said. “I think through multiple years of sounding the alarm on the fact that we had these kinds of issues going on in the county, I know the Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Services folks really stepped up as best they could, tried to address those. The boards of health throughout the county tried to address it.

Law enforcement also has worked to break up the groups distributing the drugs.

“Why are we back up this year? It’s tough to say,” Schneider said. “I know a lot of folks are going to blame this on the pandemic, and it is possible that is a factor in this. But I can’t say for certain it is, because when you look at the highest month for the year, it was February (with 21 overdose deaths), and that was prior to the lockdowns or any of the things like that.”

“Back when we started looking at these numbers, back in 2012, when we only had 103, just 31 of those from those 103 had heroin, and that’s it. It was just straight heroin. We weren’t looking at fentanyl. We’d see a little bit here and there.”

For the deceased, many continue to have fentanyl in their systems, “but what we’ve seen in recent years is the increase in methamphetamine showing up,” Schneider said.

In 2014, when there were 137 overdoses, only one involved methamphetamines. During 2019, 63 did.

“We had all but eradicated methamphetamine from the county and then we started to see this slow increase,” Schneider said. He believes this year’s overdoses will involve at least as many methamphetamines as 2019’s 63.

Among other dangers with methamphetamines, they are illicitly manufactured under toxic conditions and there’s no way of knowing what was put into them. They increase heart rates and overwork the heart, brain and other body systems, causing them to stop.

Accidental drug overdose deaths in Butler County

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* Known or suspected, through Tuesday.