Overdose victims have so many different drugs in their systems these days that it’s becoming difficult to know which caused someone to die, the DuPage County coroner says.
DuPage County had 150 deaths from drug overdoses in 2022, up from 137 in 2021 and 130 in 2020, Richard Jorgensen said.
While fentanyl, the synthetic opioid painkiller many times more powerful than heroin, continues to ravage the county, many victims are ingesting more than just that, he said.
Before 2015, the drugs typically found in overdose deaths were either heroin or prescription drugs and often only one or two of them, Jorgensen said.
“Now there’s rarely a time when there’s only one drug in the system. And if it is, it’s probably a suicide where somebody just had a whole bunch of one drug,” he said.
What’s trending in overdoses, he said, is a polypharmacy of medications made up of multiple legal and illegal drugs, he said.
“We’re typically seeing a couple of different kinds of fentanyl, some cocaine, cannabis, some prescription pills,” Jorgensen said.
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In a recent case, there were 15 different drugs involved, making it difficult to determine which caused the death, the coroner said.
“I think it’s got to be coming from the suppliers, because we see a lot of the same drugs. I don’t think that the individual drug user is going out and buying 10 different drugs to mix up in a soup,” he said.
In his report on overdose deaths in 2022 released this week, Jorgensen switched to identifying what drugs were present in toxicology reports rather than stating which drug was responsible for the death.
Jorgensen said of the 150 fatal overdoses in 2022, 106 included fentanyl.
Cocaine is making a comeback, with the stimulant found in 55 overdose cases.
The mix of drugs also can be problematic when emergency responders use naloxone to treat narcotic overdoses, Jorgensen said.
While naloxone works on opioids, it’s ineffective if the person is experiencing respiratory problems from overdosing on other drugs, he said.
“First responders and people in emergency rooms are having trouble with that,” he said.
Another trend he’s seeing is victims are getting older.
“When we first started reporting this, ages were mainly in the 20s and early 30s, and now it’s 30s, 40s and 50s. … It’s a very different scene than what we saw before,” Jorgensen said.
In 2022, 27% of DuPage’s overdose deaths were ages 30 to 39, 23% were 40 to 49, 20% were 20 to 29, 16% were 50 to 59, 10% were 60 and older, and 4% were 19 and younger.
Will County is seeing a similar age trend, where half the overdose deaths they saw in 2022 involved people ages 30 to 49 ? 30% were 30 to 29 and 21% were 40 to 49.
In the other age brackets, 3% were 15 to 19 years old, 19% were 20 to 29, 19% were 50 to 59, 11% were 60 and older, data shows.
The Will County Coroner’s Office reported 144 cases of overdose deaths in 2022, only 34 of which could be attributed to a single legal or illegal drug as the cause of death.
Twenty-six of those 34 ODs resulted from fentanyl intoxication or toxicity, four were from cocaine and four others were attributed to other drugs.
The remaining 110 overdose deaths were from multiple drugs.
Fatal overdoses in Will County have fluctuated over the past few years, with 150 reported in 2021 and 125 in 2020.
Will County data includes which agency handled the overdose. Only one case in each year was reported in Naperville from 2020 to 2022.