DROP IN OVERDOSES HARD TO PINPOINT, EXPERTS SAY

Weeks after the state Department of Health proclaimed that Rio Arriba
County's drug overdose deaths are the lowest in seven years, the
department is saying those numbers are too preliminary to release.

A Health Department report out today shows the number of illicit drug
overdoses in Rio Arriba County dropped from 18 in 1999 to 16 in 2000.
However, the agency gave no data for 2001 because it says its data is
too preliminary to release.

The report says only that preliminary data from the first six months
of 2001 suggest the rates are continuing to drop.

However, the department had already declared in a news release
earlier this month that only five people died from overdoses in Rio
Arriba County in 2001. At the time, Health Secretary Alex Valdez
credited the department's aggressive intervention programs for the
decline.

Federal and state funding to deal with longstanding drug problems was
stepped up in recent years after reports that Rio Arriba County had
the nation's highest per capita rate of deaths from overdoses of
heroin and other illegal drugs. The latest report says New Mexico
most likely continues to have the highest rate of any state.

Various other Northern New Mexico counties have recorded the second-
highest rate of overdose deaths in the last few years, according to
Mike Landen, an epidemiologist and co-author of the report.

In Santa Fe County, which has a population nearly three times larger
than Rio Arriba's, the number of overdoses fluctuated from seven in
1997 up to 13 in 1998, 19 in 1999 and 18 in 2000, the Health
Department said. Two state agencies - the Health Department and the
Office of the Medical Investigator - officially track overdose rates
in New Mexico. The Health Department only records illicit-drug
overdoses while OMI includes overdoses related to both illicit and
prescription drugs.

OMI's data supports the Health Department's conclusions that 2001 had
fewer overdose deaths in Rio Arriba County than the previous year,
according to Tim Stepetic, OMI spokesmen.

The Health Department's main focus in writing its report was to
prove, first, that the bulk of overdose deaths are related to
illicit-drug overdoses, according to Landen.

Second, the department wanted to show the number of overdoses related
to prescription drugs has remained stable over the years while the
illicit-drug deaths increased and are now declining, according to
Landen.

The report says heroin caused 44 percent of the illicit-drug-overdose
deaths between 1996 and 1998, and another 44 percent were caused by
people taking more than one drug.

The national data, last compiled for 1998, lags behind the state's
information. In 1998, New Mexico had the highest drug overdose rate
in the nation - twice as high as Oregon, the next closest state. From
1996 to 1998, the national rate was 2.2 deaths per 100,000 people
while New Mexico's annual rate was 9.4 deaths.

"I don't think things have changed that much for 1999," Landen said.
"It's doubtful that New Mexico will have dropped below first place."

Pinpointing exactly where these deaths have occurred is tricky. The
Health Department and OMI track data only by county, so there is no
way of determining how many of the overdoses occurred in city limits
versus unincorporated areas. "It's very difficult for any one person
to say that crime has gone done, that ODs have gone down in a certain
area," said Espanola Police Chief Richard Guillen. "I really can't
tell if there's been a drop in Espanola."

Mike Giddings, director of Amistad's drug-prevention and treatment
program, said people in Espanola have various opinions on whether the
overdose rates are decreasing. He believes the rates have dropped.

"Normally, when there is an OD, the hospital calls us, so we can do
some intervention, and our phone calls have dropped significantly in
the last year," Giddings said.

Exploring why people overdosed on drugs could be significant to the
state, but that information is nearly impossible to extract from
OMI's 30-year-old computer system, according to Stepetic.

OMI collects information on past medical history and general
circumstances around a person's overdose death, but it can only
retrieve the information from the computer by looking up each case
and reading the data case by case, he said. For example, it cannot
complete a computer search on how many people died after being
released from jail.

"We're getting a new system in place by the end of the year that will
allow us to call up the information that everyone would like,"
Stepetic said. "It's frustrating to have it buried in the system now."