St. Louis saw over 1,000 overdose deaths in 2021. A new operation called O.D. Justice is hoping to tackle the situation and reduce that number.
Michael A. Davis is the DEA special agent in charge of O.D. Justice. The program will hold trainings for law enforcement officers and prosecutors on how best to conduct federal overdose death investigations. Davis said it's needed to hold drug trafficking organizations accountable for putting drugs on the streets.
Davis explained that the program provides an app that officers can use to log information.
"So when they go to the scene of an overdose investigation, they will fill out a basically go to an app, after a few questions when they hit send, it will map that overdose location," Davis said. "So then law enforcement management can go in their systems and actually map out hotspots for overdose deaths. So they know where to allocate their resources."
He said that before he was in St. Louis, he was in Los Angeles, where mapping overdose hotspots was very helpful in getting resources where they needed to be.
"Because pretty much those are the areas where we're going to see the most overdose deaths. And we and where we will likely find the distributor of those drugs," he said.
One of the worst offenders when it comes to overdose deaths is fentanyl.
"Of course fentanyl is the pretty much the primary cutting agent for cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, you name it," Davis said. "It's it's what the drug trafficking organizations are using to increase their profits and trying to get citizens addicted to the substance. Unfortunately, it's causing a lot of overdose deaths here in the area."
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