PORT ANGELES – Clallam County’s chief death investigator says drugs have shown up in an alarming number of overall deaths he investigated last year.
Deputy Coroner Nathan Millet says the number of direct drug overdoses continues to climb locally. It set a record last year and put Clallam County as the second highest overdose rate by population in the state.
“What we’re looking at for last year for Clallam County is about 47 drug overdoses fatal drug overdoses for the year, which would be a record an all-time record for the county. For the year before we had 28 and then the year before that was our previous record with 36. But not that long ago, it appeared the county was averaging about one fatal overdose a month,” said Millet.
But Millet says he’s finding drugs in almost all of the other categories of 335 deaths his office investigated last year. He says they sent 107 of those cases in for toxicology reports.
“Of those 107 projected, 47 will be the result of actual drug overdoses. Of the 60 remaining accidental deaths, suicides and just ‘naturals’ that required a little bit more investigating; 13 out of the 16 accidents had drugs present. Eleven out of the 19 suicides had drugs present. In 13 out of the 36 ‘naturals’ had drugs legal or otherwise present. So, when you break down last year of all the toxicological specimens, I sent, I only got 20 reports back from the lab that were clear,” Millett told Newsradio KONP.
Millet says compiling this data is important to illustrate the big issues we have with drugs in the local community.