Duval County Medical Examiner’s office expanding due to population growth, opioid epidemic

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jacksonville leaders say that people are dying from the opioid crisis at such a high rate that the Duval County Medical Examiner’s Office needs to expand.

2019 was a violent year in Jacksonville, with 130 murders. There were nearly 160 opioid-related deaths in Northeast Florida last year. These numbers, and the growing population, has prompted the M.E. office to expand its department.

In the FY 2019-2020 approved budget, the City of Jacksonville agreed to allocate more funding to this department. The M.E. office said it will go toward more personnel and possibly more office space in Jacksonville.

The Duval County office serves four additional counties: Clay, Nassau, Columbia and Hamilton.

Action News Jax reached out to Chief Medical Examiner Dr. B. Robert Pietak for an interview, but he declined.

In a statement Pietak said in part, “Currently there are no backlog of cases at the office, however, based on the National Association of Medical Examiner’s guidelines we are recruiting for an additional forensic pathologist to join the office and maintain the recommended caseload of under 250 cases per doctor.”

The Florida Department of Health said Duval County is one of the top three Florida counties for opioid-related deaths. The department works with the city, Jacksonville Fire and Rescue and other local departments on treatment and prevention.

“Back in 2017, we were alarmed because we had over 441 opioid-related deaths,” Director of Maternal and Child Health Karen Tozzi said. “Because of that, we were targeted by the CDC to be able to get funding to work on preventing overdoses.”

The city started a pilot program with Gateway to create Project Save Lives. This put peer specialists in local emergency rooms to meet patients during treatment. Since then, Tozzi said they have seen a decrease in opioid-related deaths, but the number of patients spiked again in 2019.

“What we were finding is we were doing drug testing at the time people were coming into the emergency room and at that point we learned that it wasn’t just people are taking opioids. It was people taking other drugs with fentanyl and opioids in it.”

The department also partners with Drug-Free Duval for community awareness and prevention. More can be found here.

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