How Chicago succeeded in reducing drug overdose deaths | chicago
Among the US counties with the country’s 10 largest cities, Cook County, Illinois – where Chicago is located – saw the largest drop in overdose deaths since the national peak of the crisis in 2023, at 37%, according to an exclusive analysis by The Guardian.
Chicago has one of the strongest drug supply monitoring and overdose prevention response systems in the country. Jenny Hua, medical director of the Chicago Department of Public Health, was reluctant to take full credit for the progress made, explaining that many factors that influence overdose deaths are beyond any health department’s control. It is also easier to have a coordinated response in a large city, where people and resources are concentrated. Changes in drug supply also affect regions differently.
In order to respond to the crisis, the city adopted a “multi-factor approach to a multi-factor problem,” Hua said. Even libraries have become part of the city’s arsenal in the fight against drug overdose deaths. Chicagoans can get free drug test strips at the city’s public libraries — as well as naloxone nasal spray, which can reverse an overdose caused by opioids.
“We have already visited every library to provide education, because librarians are the source of information for the community,” Hua said.
Since 2023, Chicago has rapidly expanded overdose monitoring, in part with funding from the CDC’s Overdose Data Program. According to Hua, this helped the administration build on the foundation already established by local organizations, such as the Chicago Recovery Alliance, which has provided cutting-edge drug screening services for years.
“Credit where credit is due,” Hua said. “Before the Department of Health intervened, there was a grassroots effort to make sure that low-level users and suppliers had a little more visibility into what they were consuming, because drug supplies have always been volatile, and in the last couple of years they have been increasingly volatile.”
And most recently the city of Chicago I got a new mass spectrometerthe latest in drug screening technology, which can provide details about the purity of drugs and identify new adulterants that may have been overlooked.
“We are now testing samples for steroids that contain upwards of 10 to 12 different ingredients,” Hua said. “Getting that information out to people really helps empower them… When you tell people that the quality of the thing you’re buying is really bad, that’s actually a deterrent, believe it or not, that’s a big deterrent.”
Thanks to this technology, Chicago was able to respond quickly to new offenders. It was the first place in the country to discover medetomidine, a powerful veterinary sedative, in street drugs. the Department of Health It also issued alerts about nitazines — a newer class of synthetic opioids that can be several times stronger than fentanyl.
These adulterers may have already taken a heavy toll in other parts of the country. “A lot of these things don’t get tested,” said Jim Crotty, former deputy chief of staff at the Drug Enforcement Administration. “It’s a big blind spot.”
Understanding what is in the drug supply is also crucial to helping hospitals and emergency departments respond. This is not only about preventing fatal overdoses, but also other types of health problems. The sedative xylazine, another modern contaminant, can cause painful skin wounds It does not heal easily. When emergency departments get updated information about drug supplies, “they can get these patients out faster because they know they’re treating something they have an antidote for,” Hua said.
Hua and her team are also using ambulance data to quickly identify and respond to overdose spikes at a hyper-local level. “You have to constantly look at the data” to know where and when to respond, Hua said. “The general response is not working.”