State sees 37 percent increase in overdose fatalities

Drugs claim 4,642 in 2016, DEA says

All of the public attention, antidotes, new laws, roundtables, rehabilitation funding and drug busts have not stopped a climb in fatal overdoses that Gov. Tom Wolf on Friday called “depressing” and “awful.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration late Thursday announced that Pennsylvania saw 4,642 drug deaths in 2016 — up from 3,377 in 2015 and from 2,741 the year before.

The 2016 figure, a 37 percent increase from 2015, is four times the number of Pennsylvanians killed in car accidents. That’s 13 additional obituaries a day, most of them for people younger than 45.

“The numbers are disturbingly high,” said Patrick Trainor, a veteran DEA agent and public information officer for the Philadelphia office, which covers Pittsburgh. “Out in Allegheny County, it’s unreal.”

Philadelphia saw 907 fatal overdoses in 2016, the highest among counties. Allegheny County’s toll was 648.

The rates of increase in the state’s southwestern counties have been even higher than in the state as a whole, and they show no letup after years of dramatic increases. Some counties in the region saw fatal overdoses triple from 2014 to 2016. Somerset County has already seen more drug deaths in 2017 than in all of 2016.

In nearly 20 years on the job, Somerset County Coroner Wallace E. Miller has seen “nothing