Death and Drugs

Drugs and violent death:

The topic I have chosen is the relation between drugs and violent death. The information gathered and research done is from an article by Shane Darke, Johan Duflou, and Michelle Torok called Drugs and violent death: comparative toxicology of homocide and non-substance toxicity suicide victims. I feel that this topic is socially relevant, because of a high use of illicit drugs in our society seeing that a study done by the DEA in 2010 in a one month period, 12.7 million people had used drugs, 10 million are casual users, and 2.4 million were addicts. One other reason this topic is relevant is, many people either know someone personally or have heard of someone dying by homicide or suicide and it was drug related.

The focus of the research study I had chosen was to find the involvement of substances in deaths that are due solely to the acts of violence. The study was based off of a 10 year period where they compared the toxicology of violent suicide and homicide to determine the comparative roles of licit and illicit substances. In the study of suicide they only used the cases deemed violent, by violent they only used cases that involved hanging, falling from a height, gun shot, cuts/stabbing, drowning, and jumping from a vehicle other means such as overdose were not included. The cases used over the 10 year period were taken from autopsy and police reports that were deemed to be finalized with the victims ranging in the 15 to 60 years of age who underwent autopsy at the New South Wales Department of Forensic Medicine. Other than suicide all cases of death to murder or manslaughter were included in the homicide group. Overall there were a total of 1723 cases of death identified, 478 homicide cases, and 1245 suicide cases.

In the research they came to find out that out of all the 1723 cases substances were deteced in 65.5% of the cases and 25.8% had multiple substances detected. By a big surprise there were only 23.9% of the cases involving illicit substances and 5.3% of the cases with multiple illicit substances. They had also found out that homicide cases were the higher number of illicit substances while suicides had a high percent of substances present by those substances were antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and antipsychotic. Homicide cases seemed to have high numbers of cannabis, opioids, and psycho stimulants present. Alcohol was present in roughly 40% of the cases with shocking even numbers in homicides and suicides. Psychoactive substances were present in the majority of violent deaths, they originally thought that amphetamines or "uppers" would have been one of the main substances. Overall the hypothesis they had which was asking if there was a comparative toxicology of drugs and violent deaths, they came to the conclusion with a strong supporting answer to the question. " the role drugs play in premature deaths extends far beyond overdose and