AUBURN, Ala. — As the opioid epidemic surges, Alabama's toxicologists are testing more blood samples from overdose victims to determine what drugs were in their bodies.
But the results of those costly and time-consuming tests are not always ending up on death certificates. More often than not, when overdose victims are found to have multiple drugs in their bodies, coroners simply write “multiple drug toxicity” or “drug overdose” on the death certificate, says Alabama's forensic science chief Michael Sparks.
As a result, public health officials in Alabama and at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can be left in the dark as to which drugs are causing the most deaths. The lack of specificity can hamper states in developing potentially life-saving strategies for preventing overdoses.
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