At least according to the latest available report, which covers 2004. On page 20, you'll find an overall chart that shows that deaths from drugs and alcohol hit 253 in 2004, up from just 146 in 2001.  I am skeptical* about the exact numbers, but I do think that there was a real increase in deaths from drugs during this period.

(Could drug use be part of the explanation for the Capitol Hill murders?   Possibly.  Some common illegal drugs are known to cause psychotic episodes in a few of the people who take them.  But we may never know, because the autopsy on Kyle Huff may never be released.)

When I first wrote about the drug deaths in King County it was to make this point:

The number of deaths by drug overdoses, 195 in 2002, almost makes my second point by itself.   Though, as I said, this is about the same as the number of combat deaths in Iraq (and sharply higher in 2002 than 2001), the deaths do not seem to concern many people.  Rarely do these deaths make the front pages of the newspapers.  There are few, if any, protests over the rising toll.  Most of all, almost no one seems to think that any public official might bear some responsibility for the deaths.  Why not? Perhaps the answer can be found in this list: Seattle mayor Greg Nickels (Democrat), Seattle city council (all Democrats), King County executive Ron Sims (Democrat), King County Council (Democratic majority), and Governor Gary Locke (Democrat).  (Though the Republicans control one house of the state legislature, the Democrats control the other.)  Are journalists, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, reluctant to blame Democratic officials for their failures on crime and drugs?  I don't see how to avoid that conclusion.

And I still don't.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.

(*Why the skepticism?  Because I would expect that many drug deaths would be missed.  Autopsies are not done after most deaths, so some deaths would be missed simply because no tests were done.   And the numbers in the chart vary in ways that seem implausible to me.  For example, I would expect that deaths from alcohol would be close to constant, but instead they bounce up and down between 50 and 103 in just 8 years.  The high year, 1998, also is the second highest year for drug deaths.   Was the Medical Examiner's office using different criteria that year?  Possibly.

But despite my skepticism on the exact numbers, it does seem much more likely that drug deaths and drug use have increased in the last few years, than that they have decreased.)