Nashville suffered 30 combined overdose incidents across Sunday and Monday, Metro Nashville Police Department told The Tennessee Star about a recent spike in overdose activity in Nashville.
MNPD announced the recent overdose spike in a Tuesday press release detailing the department’s efforts to fight overdoses in Nashville in response to the rise in overdose activity. For example, MNPD highlighted its detectives distributing kits of Narcan, a medicine that can treat drug overdoses in emergency situations, to about 40 homeless individuals.
“The Neighborhood Safety Unit, an arm of the Specialized Investigations Divison (SID), investigates fatal drug overdoses with the goal of identifying the person(s) responsible for supplying the drugs,” MNPD Public Affairs Director Don Aaron told The Star about MNPD’s other efforts to fight drug crime and overdoses. “You have seen second-degree murder indictments from these investigations. We also have detectives working known drug areas in our city and take action when they see hand-to-hand interactions.”
Overdose deaths in Los Angeles County in California greatly dropped after the county began distributing naloxone, Narcan in its generic form, to places like homeless encampments and vending machines outside of prisons, The Los Angeles Times reported.
However, no conclusive data exists to say how such a practice would impact overdose incidents.
MNPD said in its press release that the most common substance in the overdose deaths appeared to be a white rock material sold as crack cocaine that contained a large amount of fentanyl.
Aaron told The Star police are investigating the overdoses and who dealt the drugs that led to the overdose spike. He pointed to the United States’ southern border as the source of the influx of fentanyl into the country.
U.S. Border Patrol seized almost 27,000 pounds of fentanyl at the southern border in 2023, a 480 percent increase from 4,600 pounds in 2020, the National Immigration Forum reported.
However, all drug overdose activity has decreased by 18 percent when compared to this time in 2023, Aaron said.
The first quarter of 2024 saw a sharp decrease in drug overdose deaths in Nashville compared to the first quarter of the previous year, according to data from the Metro Public Health Department. One hundred seventy people died from a drug overdose in the first quarter of 2023, while only 92 have done so this year, including deaths from pending cases.
Davidson County suffered the second most overdose deaths in Tennessee in 2022, according to data from the Tennessee Department of Health. Overdose deaths in the state increased by about 110 percent from 2018 to 2022.
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Matthew Giffin is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Matthew on X/Twitter.
