Project Description
Drug overdose deaths are raising in North America with opioids and endemic in Latin America due to stimulants and inhalants. Yet, little is known about mortality due to overdose deaths in Latin America. The aim of our project is to build capacity and cooperation among collaborators from Columbia University and local researchers from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico in the fields of epidemiology and psychiatry to analyze large datasets with secondary data available in each country in order to produce high-quality reports with information about drug overdoses and fill an important gap in the current knowledge. This would help to better understand the drug scenario in the countries of interest and build up a solid background to shape specific public policies directed to high risk populations. In addition, we aim to compare findings from the four countries, in order to detect singularities and similarities about drug overdose mortality in the selected countries and provide a common framework to conceive common solutions. For this, the proposed approach is based on i) the training of local researchers from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico to become leaders in psychiatric and substance abuse epidemiological research; ii) the assessment of national-level data on the trend of drug overdose deaths in the USA, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, together with analyses on demographic individual-level covariates such as gender, age, ethnicity and place of occurrence/residence, and city-level covariates such as GINI index and violence indicators, utilizing geospatial information system techniques to identify clusters; iii) the comparison of drug overdose deaths in the four countries of interest in a transnational study to comprehend how individual-level and city-level risk factors affect each environment differently using an in-depth analysis of the role of macrosystem characteristics of each country.