Ohio’s Coroner’s Office is running out of space

For the past two year’s the coroner’s office of Montgomery, Ohio, has experienced trouble trying to fit in all the bodies that flow in monthly. Most of these deaths have been caused by overdose of Opioids.  Opioids are very dangerous prescription painkillers.  And the sad reality is that these drugs are prescribed by your own doctor.

This year already, the office has processed 145 bodies mainly killed by Opioids.  More than 33,000 people died in 2015 due to an Opioid overdose in the US. To combat this growing problem, the County’s office expanded its facility in 2016 adding 12 more spaces in to their refrigerators; however, this was not enough.

The Cuyahoga county has also been experiencing an over flow. In 2016, they processed 517 deaths related to overdosing on Heroin and Fentanyl, which is almost 300 more deaths than the year before.  This problem is clearly getting out of hand for the facilities in Ohio and all across the country. “Overdoses are coming in all the time and we’re constantly full on a day-to-day basis,” Coroner Dr. Kent Harshbarger told CNN.

Opioids have caused deaths among habitual uses since 1999. From 1999 to 2015 more than 183 thousand people have died due to painkiller overdose. Unfortunately, these numbers only seem to be increasing as the years go by. One of the things that could be done to avoid the overuse of Opioids is to prescribe the medication only to those patients who have gone through painful surgery, and only for a limited amount of time.  In many of cases that resulted in overdose and death was due to the patients having an unlimited amount of these Opioids at hand. If doctors become more strict with regulations, the cases where deaths occur will greatly diminish.