Dallas officials are considering a national program that maps where overdoses happen in real time so agencies know where to deploy resources and can sound the alarm about clusters or spikes in certain areas.
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot advocated for the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program at the city’s public safety committee meeting Monday because of the nation’s addiction and overdose crisis, which health experts say has been driven in recent years by the growing presence of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.
Dallas officials haven’t yet committed to the federally funded program. Committee chairman Adam McGough said it has support, but officials are waiting to hear from health and human services. It was unclear what input city officials are seeking. Creuzot said Dallas County is one of the few counties nationally that have “very little participation” in the program from municipalities.
“One of the things that we do not do well, or as well as we can, is understand the impact of drug addiction that may lead to an overdose and an overdose that may lead to a death,” Creuzot said.
ODMAP is a software platform that provides public health and public safety government agencies with real-time surveillance data about overdose locations. An agency can input basic data about overdoses, which the software will then plot out on a national, electronic map.
Launched in 2017 by the Washington/Baltimore branch of the federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, the software helps agencies identify overdose spikes or clusters to warn hospitals and help first responders know where to deploy resources.
Agencies such as police, the fire department and emergency medical service providers can input the date and time of the overdose, the approximate location, whether it was fatal, the victim’s age and sex, drugs involved, hospital transport information and whether naloxone — otherwise known as Narcan, a medication to treat opioid overdoses — was administered.
Users can view the data on the interactive map and filter it by location, time, fatal or non-fatal overdose and other parameters. The software was created to track fatal and nonfatal overdoses nationwide.
More than 3,700 agencies across the nation now use ODMAP. The program’s website says it does not collect “personally identifiable information or personal health information,” and users will not be able to detect exact locations because addresses will be converted to GPS coordinates and “are not retained.”
Lance Sumpter, director of the Texas and Oklahoma chapter of the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, said Monday at the meeting that Harris County is participating and other departments within Dallas County signed up for the program. But, he said, “the real data is here” because the city of Dallas is the most populous in the area.
“This is not data that comes a year later,” Sumpter said. “This is actionable data long before the overdoses get to an extreme level. ... We might be able to do something about it in the hands of the people and the organizations that are charged with doing those things.”
Overdose deaths have been rising in America for two decades. Last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that an estimated 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses over a 12-month period, a never-before-seen milestone, according to The Associated Press. About two-thirds of those deaths were linked to fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.
Creuzot shared data from the medical examiner’s office that showed there were 1,167 overdose deaths in the city of Dallas from 1990 to 2010, which compares with 1,218 overdose deaths in the city from 2011 to 2020.
The city with the second-highest total from 2011 to 2020 was Garland, which had 149 overdose deaths, according to medical examiner data shared by the district attorney’s office. That was followed by Irving with 138, Mesquite with 123, Grand Prairie with 43, Farmers Branch with 37, Richardson with 36, Rowlett with 19, Carrollton with 18 and Addison with 17.
“What I don’t know is all the ones that didn’t die, because we don’t have that information,” Creuzot said.
Creuzot said there’s a fentanyl and heroin problem nationwide, and entities outside of the U.S. package fentanyl in such a way that people have died after mistaking it for other painkillers or the drug Adderall, which is used to treat ADHD.
“They’re intending to kill Americans,” Creuzot said. “They know at some point the end user’s gonna be some innocent person who’s gonna overdose and die. So, obviously this is very important to me, very important to all of us in this community.”
The public safety committee first discussed the mapping program in a closed executive session. Creuzot said in the public presentation he’s aware the council has questions concerning confidentiality, but the mapping does not include a person’s name or exact address.
Council member Paula Blackmon said her 25-year-old son asks her frequently what she’s doing about the overdose problem because he’s had 10 friends die. She said she wants to know how to arm parents with information to “help our kids.”
“This affects every community,” Blackmon said. “This is not a ZIP code thing. This really does affect young individuals across our city. ... They’re young and they’re gonna do stupid things, but we don’t want it to be fatal.”
