As I finish up the fall semester, I found myself writing two papers on different aspects of the fentanyl crisis in British Columbia.
Fentanyl has been linked to the dramatic increase in overdose deaths among people who use drugs in British Columbia. According to the BC Coroners Service, illicit drug overdose deaths have increased from 273 in 2012 to 622 in 2016 as of October. Whereas in 2012, fentanyl was detected in only 5% of illicit drug overdose deaths, this has increased to 59% in 2016. This led to multiple provincial responses including the declaration of a public health emergency by the provincial health officer in April 2016.
The increasing rate of overdose deaths attributed to fentanyl is horrifying and shows no sign of slowing down. In order to visualize the evolution of this crisis, I took a break from writing papers to develop an interactive map:
This was created using the Highmaps API and represents a choropleth visualization of the annual number of illicit drug overdose deaths by Health Service Delivery Area. The data was taken from the October 2016 Illicit Drug Overdose Report by the BC Coroners Service.
Unfortunately, WordPress does not let you include javascript, so the full interactive map can be viewed here.