Analysis of Tools and Techniques for Drug Abuse and Overdose Analytics in Local Communities

Drug abuse and overdoses are causing havoc in all
50 states. Some of the states and communities are spellbound by
the addiction. According to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, more than 67,000 people died from drug overdoses in
2018, putting it at the top of the list of injury-related deaths in
the United States. Approximately 70% of these deaths were
involved in a prescription or illicit opioid. Drugs such as
Fentanyl and prescription opioids resulted in more fatalities than
all other drugs that include Heroin, Methamphetamine and
Cocaine (NIH Overdose Death Rates. (2019)). The nation-wide,
state-wide, and the local community-wide agencies are trying to
analyze, control, and carry out measures to control this epidemic.
The means of collecting localized data at the ground level is to
find the local root causes that are driving the people toward the
drugs and identifying the impact of the measures put-up by
government agencies are lacking. We analyzed various tools and
techniques in our study and identified various issues and
challenges that can be adapted to localized communities for
detailed drug abuse and its extent to the community. To resolve
the issues, we collected and analyzed the data from multiple law
enforcement agencies: City of Muncie Police Department,
Delaware County Sheriff’s Office in Indiana and Montgomery
County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio. These agencies provided the
overdose data from 2016 to 2018 in Muncie and Delaware
County and 2017 – 2018 in Montgomery County. The R
statistical package was used to process and analyze the data to
understand how overdoses spread in the local communities.