Overdose deaths from just one kind of opioid painkiller outnumbered all homicides in Colorado in 2015, according to new data from the state’s Health Department.
In 2015, 259 people died from overdoses of what health officials call “natural” prescription opioids — drugs like hydrocodone and oxycodone. That compares with 205 people who died from homicide.
That was not the first time natural opioid overdose deaths have topped homicides; in fact, the pattern has occurred in the state every year since 2011.
But it shows how the opioid overdose epidemic — while not as bad in Colorado as in other parts of the country — is remaking the measures of death in the state and beginning to rival what are often believed to be more common ways to die.
In 2015, 329 people died in Colorado from an overdose of some kind of prescription opioid, either a natural opioid, a synthetic one such as fentanyl, or methadone. Adding in the people who died from overdoses of heroin brings the total number of opiate-related deaths in Colorado in 2015 to 472, according to the state Department of Public Health and Environment. (The sum of deaths from each type of opiate add up to more than the total number of deaths because, in some cases, multiple drugs were present in a single overdose. Data from 2016 is not yet available.)
That number is still way below the state’s leading killers: cancer and heart disease. In 2015, more than 36,000 people died in Colorado — meaning opiates accounted for only about 1.3 percent of all deaths.
But they are beginning to approach causes of death that were once much, much more common than overdose. Take, for instance, the trends in death rates for opiate overdoses versus those for diabetes.
Or how opiate overdoses came to dominate deaths from drug poisoning in Colorado, even though they had once been rivaled by cocaine.
If these trends continue, opiate deaths will soon surpass deaths from several prominent causes.
While alcohol-related liver disease deaths have also been rising, opiates are catching up.
At the start of 2015, opiate overdoses appeared poised to outnumber motor vehicle deaths for the first time in the state’s history. A leveling off of opiate deaths combined with a sudden uptick in car-crash deaths prevented that from happening.
Deaths from opiates could even surpass deaths from firearms in Colorado if this trend goes on for several more years. (Most firearms deaths in Colorado are suicides, and opiate deaths in 2015 were about 13 percent below firearm suicide deaths.)
Because of the imprecise way deaths are sometimes documented, the number of opiate overdoses in Colorado in 2015 may have been even higher than CDPHE reported.
When a doctor or a coroner lists a death as being due, generically, to just an “opioid,” health researchers tally it in a category of deaths from “other and unspecified narcotics.” Some researchers include deaths in that category in their totals of opiate-related deaths, which likely make up the majority of the category. But, because the category may also include deaths from non-opiate drugs, CDPHE does not count them in order to avoid a possible overcount.
For 2015, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed 35 deaths in Colorado in the “other and unspecified” category, though the CDC’s numbers on deaths often differ slightly from CDPHE’s.
Opiate deaths aren’t distributed equally across the state, as CDPHE reported in a November paper. Pueblo County has been particularly hard hit, and southeastern Colorado overall has struggled especially with heroin overdoses.
But the state has begun to tackle these deaths in large-scale ways. CDPHE has expanded access to naloxone, an opiate overdose-reversing drug, and also increased the number of places where people can dispose of unused pain medication. The governor’s office and the legislature have created a number of task forces to study the issue and propose solutions.
Still, officials know the problem won’t be quickly solved.
“It’s not going to come easily,” Rob Valuck, the director for one of those new task forces, the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention, said at a meeting in November, “with how complex it is.”
