City, County Partnering on Rapid Drug Testing Program

Fentanyl pills. Photo from the DEA.

The City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County are partnering on a project to collect more data on what drugs and narcotics are circulating in the community, and where.

The Milwaukee Health Department was awarded a federal grant to create a Drug Rapid-Testing and Outreach Program. The goal, with the help of the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office, is to test drug samples found in the community that typically are not getting tested, giving health officials better data on what specific drugs are turning up in the county.

The drugs in question are what the medical examiner’s office called “no case samples” or “recovered drugs,” said Greg Wallace, director of toxicology for the medical examiners office.

These are drugs found by law enforcement at the scene of a death, but where there are no criminal circumstances prompting an investigation. “Those kind of get stored away and essentially never get tested,” Wallace said.

Under the new program, these drugs will quickly be tested — quickly —  by the medical examiners office, which will then report the results to researchers who are mapping drugs and drug use in the community. The health department will then have more data to use to inform residents what is actually in the drugs circulating in their neighborhood. This includes the primary drug as well as anything that’s being added to it but unknown to the user, Wallace said.

The health department should also be able to use the data to target communities for harm reduction efforts, Wallace said.

Harm reduction refers to practices and interventions that aim to minimize the negative health outcomes associated with drug use. The overarching idea is that keeping someone alive increases the opportunity to help them eventually kick their habit. An example of harm reduction is the public distribution of narcan, a medication used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.

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