Fatal ODs approach record high in Northumberland County | News

Drug overdoses killed 22 people in Northumberland County in 2019, according to Coroner James Kelley.

It’s the deadliest start to any year for a Valley county since the recognized beginning of the heroin and opioid epidemic 20 years ago.

Toxicology tests pending in two additional death investigations could raise this year’s count to 24. That would match the county’s entire accidental drug overdose death toll for all of 2018.

By comparison, there are two confirmed cases and one pending in Union County and no accidental overdoses in Snyder County, according to coroners Dominick Adamo and Bill Pheasant, respectively.

Northumberland County’s record high of 30 fatal drug overdoses occurred in 2017. If the current pace is a trend and not an aberration, the county would more than double that count.

“I don’t know what to make of it. I hope it’s a fluke. It’s scary to think we’re at this number and we didn’t even hit the halfway point,” said Todd Owens, field supervisor, Northumberland Montour Drug Task Force.

According to Kelley, the synthetic opioid fentanyl — a prescription painkiller reproduced and sold on the black market — is the most common substance linked to the drug deaths. He said often potentially lethal levels of other drugs — namely methamphetamine — turn up in the drug screens, too. Mixed-drug toxicity makes it difficult to determine the specific drug that caused the death, Kelley said, which can hinder police investigations resulting from an overdose.

There’s been a recent rise in the appearance of gabapentin in toxicology screens, a medication prescribed for seizures or nerve pain, Kelley said.

“For me to be at a loss for words is an amazing thing. People are working so hard on this,” Kelley said of addiction education and recovery efforts.

Most of the cases occurred in the areas of Mount Carmel, Shamokin and Sunbury, Kelley said. White males aged in their mid-20s to late-30s make up the majority of the deaths, he said.

Shamokin Police Chief Darwin Tobias III said city officers used the life-saving medication naloxone to reverse four opioid overdoses this year.

Tobias and Owens each said substance users attempting recovery are at greater risk because fentanyl, substantially more potent than heroin, is now more available than ever before — cut into heroin or simply sold with buyers believing it to be heroin.

“Their body is not used to the amount or the product,” Tobias said of relapsing users ingesting the same size doses they used before achieving a period of sobriety.

“It’s in everything,” Sunbury Officer in Charge Brad Hare said, explaining how simply touching fentanyl or breathing it in can pose an overdose risk. “We have to be extra precautionary about what we’re walking into.”

Hare said the frequency of responses for overdose incidents has never been higher.

Lycoming County Coroner Charles Kiessling, immediate past president of the state coroners association, said he’s unaware of any other county experiencing such a spike in overdose deaths from last year’s totals. Kiessling said Lycoming County has approximately eight cases to date in 2019.