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