Too Many Drug Victims to Autopsy
September 27th, 2017Via: Daily Mail:
The number of people dying from opioid overdoses is skyrocketing so quickly that medical examiners’ offices across the country cannot autopsy them all.
These offices are being forced to neglect suspected opioid overdose victims by giving them a watered-down version of an autopsy that provides a minimal amount of information on their death.
In doing so, they risk missing an alternative cause of death and incorrectly calculating the number of opioid overdose victims they have seen. This, in turn, could affect the way government resources dedicated to the crisis are allocated.
But if they examine every suspected victim, they could lose their National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) accreditation, which would make them appear unreliable in court.
Because of the issue, these offices are having to prioritize the types of cases they are tasked with, predicting that the worst of the opioid crisis has not even come yet.
And more and more they are choosing to focus on homicides rather than opioid overdoses, which have become predictable in recent years as they have overtaken gun violence, car crashes and HIV as a leading cause of death.
As Alfred McCoy explained in the opening pages to The Politics of Heroin, attacking drug production (through spraying, say) results in credit-dependent farmers producing twice more the next season, and since prices go up with the diminution of supply, other production areas join in. But taking demand down may prevent this from happening.