We need a better reporting system for tracking drug overdoses

The most recent data shows that 5,413 New Yorkers died in a single year due to opioidrelated overdoses. That’s roughly one death every two hours.

That reflects an overwhelming crisis. But here’s the problem: That data is from the year 2022. That’s right — New York is a full year behind in reporting the scope and speed of a plague ravaging our state.

Though New York state has stepped up its fight against the opioid epidemic, we can and should be doing more. We can start by actually determining the size of the problem.

For comparison, consider how we track murder rates. Every week, each local government reports to the state its recorded murders along with other major crimes, giving law enforcement and governments a real-time view of the extent of the challenge. How many murders were there in New York in 2022? 762. That’s one-seventh as many overdoses. Yet the level of transparency on the problem is a full year behind.

Annual reports dated back to the previous year do not help save lives. In fact, the delay exacerbates the problem: It has allowed this supercharged era of the opioid crisis, driven by lethal fentanyl, to take hold and spread virally.

We need a system that provides frequent data of key substance use areas, along with hospital and police reports. One simple way to do that is by adequately funding the offices of the medical examiner across the state.

With more funding, and by working together with hospitals and police departments, the medical examiners’ offices would be able to report deaths from overdoses much more quickly. The state would be able to create projections for the number of overdoses and deaths in the coming years.

Along with the thousands of New Yorkers who die each year from drug use, even more almost die — though we do not know how many because the state doesn’t account for them. Near-death experiences are just as alarming as actual deaths, and it’s often information we don’t capture because we don’t have the resources. But if we were able to get timely data on what demographics are having

near-death experiences from substance use, we can intervene in those communities much more quickly.

Information obtained in toxicology laboratories, like how much of a substance is in a person’s body, helps service providers because it can show us how and what is causing these deaths, where these deaths and near misses are occurring, and how best to help

Other states have already developed much more nimble reporting system. The Connecticut Department of Public Health releases monthly reports of drug overdose deaths. In the first week of January, they also released the Connecticut Drug Overdose Emergency Department Visit Report with a reporting period ending of December 31, 2023. Robust reporting like Connecticut’s can uncover trends, such as where people — and which people — are using certain opioids. Armed with the correct data, we can implement the right public health campaigns, drop off preventive care like Narcan, and root out the causes of opioid use.

Each death is not just a number — it is a person, with a story and a grieving family left behind. We owe it to them to prevent future deaths at the hands of these deadly substances. Now is not the time for the state to hold back on funding. With the right resources we can put our arms around this problem — understand the size of it — and we can begin to fight the war and win.