About 11,200 people were killed by guns in 2015 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 10,574 people died from heroin overdoses in 2014, the most recent year that statistics are available. Overdose deaths are like gun violence ranging through cities and rural counties alike. According to the CDC, overdose deaths rose 26% from 2013 to 2014, putting it on pace to pass gun deaths when the data is available.
One West Virginia city had 27 heroin overdoses within four hours, including one death, in Huntington, West Virginia, on Monday. Officials believe the drug may be laced with something to make it particularly dangerous according to Tony Marco, CNN.
“I do not know what it was laced with, but I would love to know at this point,” Cabell County EMS Director Gordon Merry said.
There is some hope that the death can lead to some clues about what may be making the drugs so dangerous. Huntington Chief of Police Joe Ciccarelli said. “The state medical examiner will conduct a toxicology analysis to determine what was in the drug, but that will not come back for about 10 weeks. We did not seize any heroin from the other overdose victims, so we can’t analyze theirs.”
Opioid related deaths could top 13,000 for 2015, surpassing 11,200 people who died from gun related deaths.
Overdoses on the rise
Huntington is in Cabell County, where there have been at least 440 overdoses this year. Twenty-six of those were fatal, said Scott Lemley, an investigator with the Huntington Police department.
There were 413 overdoses countywide during the same period last year. But there were 35 deaths in the county over the first half of last year, so there’s been a 26% decrease, according to Lemley.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest data, from 2014, West Virginia has the highest rate of drug overdose death in the country.
“It’s way too early to tell what the heroin in these latest cases was laced, with but I suspect it was fentanyl and maybe something else,” said Lemley. “A majority of the overdoses cases are laced with fentanyl, Xanax or something. It’s very rare to find pure heroin these days.”
A third of the overdoses deaths in Cabell County are probably related to fentanyl, according to Lemley.