These Wisconsin Counties Lead State In Opioid, Fentanyl Deaths: Report

WISCONSIN — Not only does Milwaukee County have the highest rates of opioid and other drug overdose deaths in Wisconsin, but it is among the top ten areas across America with the highest overdose death rates, according to a tracker based on federal health data.

A study published in The Lancet last year found the North American opioid crisis was driven by insufficient regulation of the pharmaceutical and health care industries, enabling a “profit-driven quadrupling of opioid prescribing” for a broad range of chronic, non-cancer pain conditions.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of people have fatally overdosed on prescription opioids and millions more became addicted, the researchers said. As a result, heroin markets became saturated with synthetics, including the more deadly and cheaper fentanyl.

There were six times more drug overdose deaths in 2021 than in 1999, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. More than 75 percent of the nearly 107,000 drug overdose deaths in 2021 involved an opioid or synthetic opioid. Since 1999, more than a million people nationwide have died of drug overdoses, according to CDC data.

A data visualization by the San Francisco Chronicle shows overdose deaths per 100,000 residents and the share of deaths that involve fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

In Milwaukee County, the drug overdose death rate was 72.6 out of every 100,000 residents in 2022, totaling 667 deaths with 81 percent related to fentanyl. That's up from 39.9 overdose deaths per 100,000 residents in 2018, when 52 percent of deaths involved fentanyl.

Trailing behind Milwaukee for the highest rate of overdose deaths are Ashland County, Rock County, La Cross County and Douglas County.

In Dane County, home to Wisconsin's second most populous city, Madison, the overdose death rate in 2022 was 29.2 per 100,000 residents with 166 deaths recorded.