DETROIT, MI – Drug Overdose Deaths climbed 14 percent in 2014, claiming the lives of 1,745 people in Michigan, the state Department of Health and Human Services said in a new report released Monday.
Drug overdose deaths in 2014, the latest year for which statistics are available, were the No. 1 cause of injury-related deaths, outpacing deaths from automobile accident, which claimed only about half as many lives — 876.
The largest number of drug overdose deaths came in Wayne County and Detroit, the state’s most populous county and city. Countywide, 322 people (18 percent of all overdoses) died as a result of overdoses, 132 of them in Detroit alone (7.5 of all overdoses).
Macomb County accounted for 14 percent of drug overdose deaths statewide with 249. In Oakland County, 127 people overdosed from drugs (7.2) percent. In Washtenaw County, 65 people (3.7 percent of the total statewide) died of drug overdoses.
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Heroin and other opioids were used in 1,001 of the overdoses, an increase from 99 in 1999. Some other key findings from the Michigan Prescription Drug and Opioid Abuse Task Force report:
Men are more likely to die of heroin overdoses than woman, at a rate of 7 per 100,000 overdoses, compared to 2.1 for women.
Adults age 35-44 died of opioid overdoses at a rate of 12 per 100,000, compared with 11.3 per 100,000 for younger adults ages 25-34.
When heroin and all opioid overdose deaths are combined, men died at a rate of 21.4 per 100,000, compared with 14.1 per 100,000 for women.
