San Francisco Preliminary Unintentional Drug Overdose Deaths by Month

Preliminary Unintentional Drug Overdose Deaths is a dataset from the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). It contains monthly counts of preliminary unintentional fatal drug overdoses, manually updated based on OCME's monthly reports. The data includes cases under investigation for opioid, cocaine, or methamphetamine toxicity, as well as finalized cases attributed to any substance.

Use Cases

• Tracking monthly trends in unintentional fatal drug overdoses based on the reported time-series data.
• Analyzing the impact of public health interventions on overdose mortality based on the preliminary death counts.
• Correlating overdose fatalities with other datasets like EMS responses or substance use services, as suggested by the related datasets.
• Monitoring changes in preliminary counts as investigations are finalized, based on the description of the update process.

Strengths

• Data is sourced directly from the authoritative San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
• Updated monthly following the release of official reports, suggesting regular maintenance.
• Includes both preliminary and finalized overdose determinations, as described in the creation process.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to being limited to San Francisco.

Provenance

Source

San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME)

Collection Method

Data is manually copied from monthly OCME reports by Department of Public Health staff.

Time Range

Monthly data, with updates to previous months as investigations conclude.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-22 04:18:06.839848; freshness should be verified.

Geography

San Francisco, United States