One death per day from overdoses

FRANKLIN COUNTY

The Franklin County coroner issued a warning Thursday that her office has seen an average of a death per day from fentanyl overdoses in the past month. Coroner Anahi Ortiz called the rate “unprecedented” and “alarmingly high.”

“This is killing us and will result in a generation with no parents to look at kinship care and children’s” care, said Tia Moretti, the coroner’s spokeswoman.

Fentanyl is a manmade opioid that provides

the same type of high as heroin. More and more, authorities are seeing fentanyl — which is 50 times more potent than heroin — mixed with heroin because it is cheaper. That means those taking fentanyl-laced heroin are more likely to overdose because they don’t know they also are ingesting the more powerful drug.

“Either the fentanyl is sold as heroin or the fentanyl is cut into the heroin,” Dan Baker, chief toxicologist at the Franklin County coroner’s office, said Thursday.

From Feb. 7 through March 5, Ortiz said, 30 overdose deaths related to fentanyl were reported within the county. Franklin County saw 55 fentanyl-related overdose deaths in January and February, almost half of the total number of fentanyl-related overdose deaths in 2016, the coroner’s office said.

The coroner’s lab saw an additional 13 fentanyl-related overdose deaths in the same time from areas outside Franklin County that pay Ortiz and her office to conduct autopsies.

The announcement came a day before the Franklin County Opiate Crisis Task Force was to meet today. Ortiz helped start that group last year. It consists of about 200 officials and leaders of organizations fighting the heroin and opioid epidemic. They review opioid overdose deaths to determine what agencies could have done to prevent them.

It also comes less than a week before Ortiz will host the second Opiate Crisis Summit, attracting speakers from across the area and the country to discuss dealing with the crisis.

“We want to get this information out so all these stakeholders can discuss what each of them can do,” Baker said.

“It would be better to put out information and say, ‘we’re experiencing all of these’ “overdose deaths, hopeful that information can be heard by users who then might take precautions.

Last week, Franklin County Commissioner John O’Grady and Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther held a meeting in which leadership for addressing the opioid epidemic in Franklin County was given to David Royer, head of the county’s Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Board, which spends millions of dollars per year providing treatment and rehabilitation.