Across Michigan, deaths from drug overdoses ‒ fueled by a rise in synthetic opioids such as street fentanyl ‒ are climbing fast and almost no area is immune. Click on a county to get year-by-year statistics and more information.
A few years ago, fentanyl barely registered in state drug overdose tallies.
Today, a street version of the synthetic opioid has overtaken prescription painkillers as the primary cause of overdose deaths. The shift is statewide, fueling huge spikes in overdose deaths, with ground zero in the mostly white, working-class communities surrounding Detroit.
Indeed, eight of the 10 highest overdose death rates in Michigan from 2013 through 2015 were blue-collar cities in Wayne County, according to a Bridge analysis of opioid deaths from report data collected for the state. (The other two highest rates were in neighboring Macomb County.)
“There are days when I walk into the autopsy room and there are 12 to 15 bodies,” Wayne County Medical Examiner Carl Schmidt told Bridge. “Half of those are drug cases.”
In 2017, according to preliminary calculations, about three-quarters of fatal overdoses in Wayne County were tied to fentanyl, an eight-fold increase in three years. The statewide share of overdose deaths tied to synthetic opioids also has risen sharply, from 5.6 percent to 39 percent between 2013 and 2015.