By Steve Brawner, © 2019 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

In Arkansas, 434 people died of a drug overdose in 2018. The year before, 429 died, and 188 of those involved opioids.

Well, about that many. All of those probably should be higher. The Centers for Disease Control and other government agencies don’t have great numbers because they aren’t reported uniformly and aren’t compiled in a timely manner.

Moreover, Arkansas’ numbers often depend on the judgments of 75 county coroners, all but two of them elected, whose only qualifications are that they be 18, registered to vote, residents of their counties, and not felons. Training is offered and encouraged, but they are not required to complete it because they are constitutional officers. (However, under a law passed this year, training is required for their deputies, if they have them.)

Also, sometimes families ask coroners to assign an opioid death’s cause to, say, a heart attack, which sounds better and technically is correct but doesn’t tell the whole story.

Having accurate numbers is important because it enables the state to target its limited resources. As Arkansas Drug Director Kirk Lane noted Wednesday, we’re spending today’s dollars based on 2016 and 2017 numbers. Law enforcement, health providers and policymakers can do their jobs better when they know what’s happening on the ground – for example, an outbreak of deaths in a particular area. But they might not know if the coroner isn’t classifying the deaths correctly because of a lack of training or to spare a grieving family a lasting legal affirmation of their loved one’s drug addiction.

The state is trying to ensure it has accurate numbers. Using an almost $1 million federal grant, it’s setting up an online database that will make the latest information almost immediately available to the relevant agencies.

The Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care is creating the database, which should be ready in the next three to six months. The principal agencies had their first collaborative meeting Wednesday in Little Rock.

Information for the database will come from a variety of sources, but when it comes to deaths, we’re relying on those coroners.

And they’re potentially the weak link because they don’t have to do what the system needs them to do. Only 51 of the 75 are members of the Arkansas Coroners’ Association. Saline County Coroner Kevin Cleghorn, the association’s president, said only about 42-43 are using the free online MDILog tool, which helps them assign death causes using standardized methods. The $1 million database depends on them using that tool.

Cleghorn and other association members are actively and personally encouraging their fellow coroners to participate in the system. He said quite a few new coroners were elected last November, and the association has experienced “massive growth” in the last six months.

But some coroners don’t want to change the way they’ve always done things. One coroner doesn’t even have a computer, and his county won’t buy him one.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m disparaging coroners, who have an extremely demanding job. Cleghorn said his office maintains case files for each of Saline County’s 800-900 annual deaths. He and his two full-time and six part-time deputies see many dead bodies. He told me and another reporter, “We see things that no man should ever have to see in a lot of cases.”

Hopefully, most coroners eventually will get involved with the association, get the training, and start using the MDILog. Any stragglers will skew the numbers.

In the meantime, this is a reminder that those down-ballot races matter. Come election time, we voters spend most of our mental energy on the presidential race and maybe a little on the other big races. We don’t spend much time considering low-profile local offices like the county coroner.

Maybe we should allot our time differently. For combating the opioid epidemic, it turns out that the names on the bottom of the ballot are as important as those at the top.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.