The opioid crisis had a significant impact on how many admissions there were for chemical dependency treatment in Onondaga County. The numbers cannot be taken at face value because they do not consider the amount of people who were admitted to multiple programs or who were transferred out of state for treatment. The raw data include more than 65 thousand rows of statistics, starting from 2007 going to 2016, so I filtered it by only including inpatient rehabilitation for heroin and other opioids. The ages ranged from under 18 to 55 and older, with people between 18 and 34 being the most affected.
There are six types of general treatment programs and several sub categories. The other rehabilitation programs include crisis, opioid treatment, residential, outpatient and specialized. The main sub categories I looked at were medically supervised withdrawal for inpatients, medically managed detoxification and medically monitored withdrawal, among others. The data show that except for medically managed detoxification, the number of admissions went up significantly starting in 2013, peaking in 2016, which is when the opioid crisis started taking off in the United States and New York.
The numbers also support this trend locally because according to New York’s Health Department (page 67 of the report), outpatient emergency department visits in Onondaga County increased from 307 in 2015 to 482 in 2016, which is roughly 103 people out of every 100,000. The crisis has seen disturbing effects because opioid related deaths tripled in Onondaga County from 2012 to 2016, but went down 28 percent between 2016 and the beginning of last year.