Connecticut Data Collaborative

Under 21 years;21 to 45 years;46 to 60 years;61 years and over;Total

Accidental Drug Related Deaths by Drug Type reports totals and subtotals of deaths attributable to accidental drug overdoses by place of death as reported by the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Deaths are grouped by age, race, ethnicity, and gender and by the types of drugs detected post-death.

Health

Total;Any Opioid;Only Opioids;Any Non-Heroin Opioid;Only Non-Heroin Opioids;Any Non-Opioid;Only Non-Opioids

Not Hispanic;Hispanic;Total

Annual

Accidental Drug Related Deaths reports totals and subtotals of deaths attributable to accidental drug overdoses by place of death as reported by the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Deaths are grouped by age, race, ethnicity, and gender and by the types of drugs detected post-death. Individual deaths are categorized according to the presence of specific substances and also according to the presence of any opioid substance. As part of the data cleaning process, CTData evaluated the accuracy of the 'Any Opioid' category and manually adjusted some records that were not properly flagged as being an opioid-involved death. Therefore our totals may not match totals generated from the raw data available from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner annotates individual deaths with any and all substances detected during post-death investigation. Therefore, individual deaths can be counted as involving multiple substances. We report town-level totals and subtotals by the individual substances detected and reported as well as a number of aggregated categories that were derived from individual record data during processing.

• Total reports the total number of deaths.
• Any Opioid reports deaths that involved any opioid. These deaths may involve non-opioid substances (e.g. Ethanol/Alcohol).
• Only Opioid reports deaths that only involved opioid substances. These deaths may involve multiple opioids (e.g. Heroin and Fentanyl).
• Any Non-Heroin Opioid reports deaths that involved one or more non-heroin opioid. These deaths may involve non-opioids and/or Heroin (e.g. Oxycodone and Cocaine or Methadone, Heroin and Alcohol).
• Only Non-Heroin Opioid reports deaths that only involved non-heroin opioids. These deaths may involve multiple non-heroin opioids (e.g. Oxycodone and Morphine).
• Any Non-Opioid reports deaths that involved any non-opioid substance. These deaths may involve one or more opioids (e.g. Amphetamine and Alcohol or Cocaine and Oxymorphone).
• Only Non-Opioid reports deaths that only involved non-opioids. These deaths may involve multiple non-opioid substances (e.g. Cocaine and Amphetamine).
• Other reports deaths not otherwise attributable to any enumerated substance or to Any Opioid. In some cases, individual death records indicated a identifiable opioid in the Other field or in the ImmediateCause field. In these cases we have recoded those deaths as Any Opioid. As a result, our Other totals do not necessarily match totals that might be generated by aggregating the unmodified raw data reported by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

We have provided these aggregations in order to address problems stemming from individual deaths being attributable to multiple substances. Individual deaths frequentally involved multiple substances and that the subtotals we report cannot be summed without counting some individual deaths multiple times. For example, deaths involving Heroin may also involve Cocaine. Selecting Heroin and Cocaine will report total deaths involving each drug and each totals may include individual deaths that involved both substances. Summing these two totals would result in double-counting deaths.

The raw data provided by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner also recorded a small number of deaths as 'Morphine (non heroin)'. The 'non heroin' modifier introduces ambiguity in interpreting these deaths. Raw morphine is often transformed into heroin via a crude acetylation. As a result, it is not clear if these values are intended to indicate deaths involving raw morphine (e.g. non- transformed) or if they indicate deaths involving morphine but not heroin.

Female;Male;Total

Town

2018

Number

White;Black;Other;Total

True

https://data.ct.gov/Health-and-Human-Services/Accidental-Drug-Related-Deaths-2012-2018/rybz-nyjw

Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

Substance Abuse

Accidental Drug Related Deaths

2012;2013;2014;2015;2016;2017;2018