Summary/Abstract

The CDC has just released the overdose data from 2015. The current data collection technology seems to be a little outdated. Getting the overdose data a year later seems like an awfully long time to be of any real help. With the amount of real and fake news stories bombarding the public in this day and age, we believe the seriousness of these numbers of lives lost or saved, by Naloxone, becomes old news with the passage of  a very short period of time. After all, the data is only released once a year and after a week or two, it’s forgotten by most and we don't hear about it again until a year later. We believe that The Overdose Warning Network (OWN) can be a valuable tool for the CDC and the Nation as a whole to keep the public informed as to how serious the opioid epidemic is. 

Content

The number of deaths from overdoses of illicit opioids rose sharply again in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday, December 8th, 2016.

"The epidemic of deaths involving opioids continues to worsen," said CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said. "Prescription opioid misuse and use of heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl are intertwined and deeply troubling problems."

Overdose deaths (9,580) from synthetic opioids, most of them fentanyl related, skyrocketed by 73%. Deaths that involved prescription opioids (17,536) rose just 4% and deaths attributed to heroin (12,990) went up 23% in 2015.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, estimated that worldwide, there is estimate be over 29 million people who suffer from drug use disorders.  Also there were and estimated 207,400 drug-related deaths in 2014. Roughly a third and a half of all drug-related deaths, are attributable to opioids.

Imagine if we knew how many people overdosed yesterday, last week, last month or even since we got out of bed this morning. What would the news media do with that data? Would it report it? Would it release the daily or weekly numbers of people who overdosed in your town, city or state? Would it wake people up to the fact that 169 people are dying every day which exceeds automobile and shooting fatalities? 

In the late 60's and early 70's during the height of the Vietnam War, every evening reporters such as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather would give an update on the war that included fatalities. Our generation took to the street infuriated by the waste of human lives and generated a level of social unrest that contributed to the end of the war. Unfortunately we as a nation have been desensitized to the value of human life and have been infected with what social psychologists call "the bystanders syndrome". 

Since it's almost 2017, the numbers have most certainly increased substantially since then and increases for 2017 are projected.

What kind of response would we get from our legislators?  Would they look at increasing treatment resources or even look closer at safe injection sites where people can be monitored by professionals who can treat them with Naloxone should they overdose with compassion instead of moral judgement? Would it sink in that we, as a citizens need to stand up say enough is enough? 

The Overdose Warning Network (OWN) will have the ability to:

• Produce realtime statistcs.
• To provide a real time platform to track the incidence and prevalence of opioid overdoses by location and the demographics of the population.
• To Provide data for prevention and treatment capacity planning
• To serve as an early warning system to alert healthcare, law enforcement, policy makers and citizens.
• To provide a reliable data source for prevention and treatment budgeting, provide a big data resource for research.
• To provide reliable, real time data sets utilizing uniform data collection methods to inform public policy and legislation. 
• Save lives by having the ability to, track geographically, lethal and adulturated drugs.

Let's face it.... The data provided to us below is outdated and only tells what happened a year or more ago... Not what's happening now!

The Overdose Warning Network can change how we look at the fatalities in todays drug war, just like we saw the fatalities of the Vietnam war. 

http://overdose-911.com/own/