May 28, 2015 3 min read

Last year, 2,489 Pennsylvanians died from drug overdoses. Actually, we don’t really know how many died from that cause, but it is most likely higher than the figure reported by the state Department of Health.

Why? Because Pennsylvania has no uniform standards for drug-death statistics.

How many of those deaths were from heroin? Eight hundred, according to the state, but again we have no way of determining the extent of the problem because in Pennsylvania, the 67 county coroners and medical examiners operate under their own set of rules to determine if a drug overdose was caused by heroin.

Unless you were vacationing on Jupiter for the past five or six years, you know we have a problem with heroin here in Western Pennsylvania. In Washington County in 2013, 58 people died from drug overdose, 30 of those deaths involving heroin. Last year, the number of deaths dropped to 36 overall, and only nine from heroin as a single drug or a combination with other drugs. In the first three months of this year, 11 overdose deaths were reported, four involving heroin.

We know these figures because Washington County Coroner Tim Warco’s reports are highly detailed. That’s not the case in many counties, including neighboring Greene.

In an article by Public Source in Tuesday’s editions, Gary Tennis, secretary of the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, explained why the quality of statistics is so lacking. He said coroners might defer to the family and mark and overdose as respiratory arrest on the death certificate. If that’s happening – and because coroners are elected and beholden to voters it most certainly is – the heroin epidemic looks smaller than it actually is.

That Greene County has been hit hard by the heroin epidemic is a widely held assumption, but it’s not supported by statistics. The Greene County coroner reports deaths from overdoses but does not specify the drugs. For the Pennsylvania State Coroners Association’s Heroin Overdose Death Report, Greene listed 14 deaths from drugs for the years 2009 through 2013. It reported 10 deaths in 2014, only 20 percent from illegal drugs.

Is this an accurate reflection of reality?

“We absolutely need 100 percent accurate reporting,” Tennis said. “All of government does, because we can’t address the problem if we don’t have a good grasp of exactly what the problem is, where it is, how bad it is, what drugs are involved, who is overdosing, all that information we’ve got to have.”

Unless we want to see yet another generation of young people destroy their lives, we need to thoroughly understand the depth at which heroin has seeped into society. We need to understand who is susceptible to deadly drugs and how best to treat them and return them to productive lives.

We need to determine exactly what the problem is so we can use resources, law enforcement and our courts in a way that spends taxpayers’ money wisely.

We don’t do that by locking up in prisons all the addicts we can find, and we don’t do that by ignoring the problem.