Drug deaths grew in Dutchess, Ulster

ALBANY - Amid the rise in heroin use and drug-related deaths in New York, Dutchess County frequently saw the highest rates of death in the state from 2010 to 2015, a new report found.

Fueled by a surge in heroin abuse, New York had a remarkable spike in overdoses over the six-year period and drug-related deaths rose 71 percent, according to analysis of federal data by The Rockefeller Institute of Government.

And the problem was most pronounced in the New York City suburbs and upstate, the institute's report found.

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In the city, the annual drug-related deaths rose 45 percent over the six-year stretch, but spiked 84 percent in large upstate counties outside the city.

“Like the rest of the nation, New York is experiencing a serious drug epidemic. The number of drug overdose and chronic drug abuse deaths have skyrocketed over the past several years, especially in our upstate and suburban communities — with no signs of letting up," said Jim Malatras, the institute's president and a former top aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

While Dutchess did not see a huge spike in drug-related deaths, in the six years analyzed, the county had the highest drug-related death rate of any New York county in three of those years: 2010, 2012 and 2013.

Dutchess' per-capita drug-related death rate hit a high of 24.2 per 100,000 people in 2013, but fell to a rate of 16.9 in 2014, yet went back up to 22 deaths per 100,000 people in 2015.

The total deaths per year stayed relatively flat over the six years: It grew from 59 deaths in 2010 to a high of 72 in 2013, then back to 65 deaths in 2015, the report showed.

Among the state's largest counties, Erie had a 256 percent increase in per-capita drug deaths from 2010 to 2015, while it was 145 percent in Onondaga and 133 percent in Ulster.

Ulster County had 15 drug-related deaths in 2010 and 35 in 2015, the data showed.

Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro addressed the rise in heroin abuse during his State of the County speech in February, calling it "the public health crisis of our lifetime."

He touted the county's new Stabilization Center, a 24/7 facility that helps addicts rather than putting them in jails or emergency rooms. He said it's one of numerous steps the county takes to cut down on drug abuse.

"This epidemic affects every community, every race, color, creed and level of income," he said. "Our community, our interrelated family, is losing too many lives."

A Poughkeepsie Journal investigation earlier this month found that in the first nine months of 2015 in Dutchess County, 38 people died of opioid-related overdoses. For the same period in 2016, 28 people died, according to state data. In New York state, excluding New York City, 887 people died of opioid-related overdoses from January to October 2015. For the same period in 2016, 727 people died.

In the last two years, the use of naloxone, an intranasal medication that reverses the effects of illicit or prescription opioids, increased in Dutchess and New York. Its use in Dutchess jumped 29 percent from 331 incidents in 2015 to 428 in 2016, according to state data. In New York state, excluding New York City, naloxone use jumped 30 percent from 7,017 incidents in 2015 to 9,157 for 2016.

NY vs. the nation

The report said men died of drug overdoses or chronic drug abuse at more than twice the rate than women in New York, and white people died at a higher rate than black and Hispanic people in the state.

Overall, 3,009 New Yorkers died from drug overdoses in 2015, a 71 percent increase from 2010, the institute's review of the federal data showed.

Still, New York's problems were less than many states.

In 2015, New York ranked 34th in the nation in its overall death rate from overdoses and chronic drug abuse, Malatras, the report's author, said.

So while Erie had the highest rate of any county in a single year (31.7 per 100,000 people in 2015), it ranked 19th highest in the nation that year. The highest in 2015 was in McDowell County, West Virginia, which had a drug-related death rate of 141 for every 100,000 people, the report said.

State's fight

The state has taken a number of steps to try to curb the drug abuse.

In 2012, the state Legislature and Cuomo passed a series of laws to crack down on prescription drug abuse.

Then in 2014 and again last year, they passed another round of laws aimed directly at opioid abuse, such as making treatment more available, toughening penalties for use of opioids and expanding access to the overdose antidote drug, called naloxone.

The state budget approved April 9 earmarks $213 million to fight the heroin, fentanyl and opioid crisis in New York, up nearly 13 percent from the prior year.

The Republican-led Senate on Monday passed a series of new measures to fight drug addiction.

“I believe that it this the worst drug scourge this nation has ever faced,” Cuomo said last Wednesday on Long Island. “This is worse than crack, this is worse than meth. This is worse than old-time heroin.”

Cuomo said people might think of drug abuse as an urban problem, but that would be a wrong assumption.

"It is more of a suburban issue and more of a rural issue than an urban issue, which is one of the things that makes it a little different," Cuomo said.

"You think of drug abuse: Well, that's an urban problem. That's a poor problem in urban populations. Not anymore."