LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — The Southern Nevada Well being Consortium introduced the group collectively for the ninth Annual Worldwide Overdose Consciousness Day, an occasion about remembering the members of the group who misplaced their battle to dependancy.
New knowledge exhibits overdose deaths jumped almost 16 % up to now yr with fentanyl driving a lot of that improve.
“Overdoses and fentanyl have decreased all over the United States except for here. Just to put that in perspective, our overdoses have increased 115% from 2020 to 2023,” mentioned Chris Reynolds, president for the Southern Nevada Well being Consortium.
The message is easy: overdoses are preventable, and with the fitting instruments, the fitting training, and the fitting assist, lives will be saved.
Since 2018, opioid-related deaths in Clark County have greater than doubled, climbing to 22 deaths per 100,000 residents. Reynolds mentioned one of many hardest-hit communities is Downtown Las Vegas, the place overdose charges are among the many highest within the nation.
“This event is about realizing that this could be anybody’s brother, mother, aunt, cousin, neighbor, or friend. We just want to educate people on how to identify overdoses and how to prevent them,” Reynolds mentioned.
For households like Nicole Frederick’s, the disaster is deeply private. Her husband died of a fentanyl overdose in Might, a loss she mentioned shattered her world but additionally pushed her to talk out.
“He was more than just a number, and that he mattered to so many people, and that this epidemic has to stop because he’s a father and a husband,” Frederick mentioned.
One of the emotional tributes was the Soles for Souls exhibit that had rows of sneakers representing each individual in Southern Nevada who died of an overdose up to now yr.
The very best burden was concentrated in ZIP code 89101 with a mortality fee of 120 deaths per 100,000 residents. Fentanyl stays the first driver of the native opioid epidemic, with fentanyl-related deaths growing 92.7% between 2020 and 2023.
