As opiate addiction continues to devastate communities across the commonwealth, the state department of public health has released data showing prescription rates and overdose deaths for Dukes County.

During 2013, 2,537 people received prescriptions for schedule II opioids, a category that includes oxycodone, morphine, fentanyl, transdermal, hydromorphone, oxymorphone, and methadone.

According to the report, Dukes County ranks second among counties in the state, with 14.7 per cent of the population receiving opioid prescriptions, although this number is likely misleading since transient individuals, who make up a significant portion of those receiving prescriptions on the Vineyard, are included. The state uses the year-round population, as determined by the latest U.S. census, to calculate percentages.

Statewide, 741,908 people received opioid prescriptions in 2013, or 11.1 per cent of the population.

The data also show that prescriptions in Dukes County are on the decline. In 2009, 2,873 people received opioid medication in Dukes County.

The data was released this month as part of an effort to address a growing opioid crisis, according to a state press release that accompanied the data.

“The best tool we have in this fight against opioid addiction is information,” Secretary of Health and Human services Marylou Sudders said in the release. “We can use this data to better inform how we distribute resources so we can help individuals and families that are at greatest risk get the help they need.”

Another data set released this month shows that between 2000 and 2013, 11 people died from opiate overdoses in Dukes County.

Statewide, there were 7,929 overdose fatalities between 2000 and 2013. Over that 14-year period, annual fatalities nearly tripled, from 338 in 2000 to 978 deaths in 2013.

The state has been tracking this data for more than a decade, but the public release of the information marks a new strategy.

“It’s a response to the opiate crisis,” said Thomas Land, director of the state office of Data Management and Outcomes Assessment. “I think we have been gathering information over the past year in order to prepare ourselves to do a much more timely and regular reporting schedule.”

Though confirmed deaths are not available since 2013 due to a backlog at the medical examiner’s office, the upward trend in fatalities has apparently continued in recent years.

State police counted 243 suspected opiate fatalities since Dec. 1; none were recorded for Dukes County.

But Vineyard psychiatrist Dr. Charles Silberstein, who began tracking overdose fatalities on the Island in August of 2013, says he’s counted 10 overdose deaths.

“I am counting close to a death every other month,” Dr. Silberstein told the Gazette this week.

For a large portion of his patients under treatment for addiction, he said prescription drugs were their introduction to opiates.

Doctors were once more naive about the risks involved in prescribing painkillers, but awareness has since grown, including among Vineyard physicians, Dr. Silberstein said.

“They [the prescriptions] are now much harder to get from Island MDs,” he said.

All doctors are now mandated to participate in the state’s prescription monitoring program, an online database that went live in December and allows doctors to review a patient’s prescription history before writing a new script.

“It’s basically a database of every substance that is prescribed in Massachusetts,” said Dr. Pieter M. Pil, a general surgeon at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. “Whenever we give a new prescription, a narcotic or a benzodiazepine, we visit that database and look up the patient we are prescribing for.”

The database is designed to curb doctor shopping, when patients seek medication from doctors in multiple locations to increase their dosages.

Now, those scripts can be tracked, as long as they stay within the state of Massachusetts.

“It becomes quickly obvious if the patient is seeking medication for resale as opposed to their own use,” Dr. Pil said. “Before this database was available, you had no idea if a patient had seen a doctor somewhere else.”

The state keeps track of so-called “individuals with activity of concern” who receive prescriptions from different prescribers. In Dukes County, the state has identified 32 such people, though that group may include visitors and seasonal residents.

Dr. Pil said pain is a somewhat nebulous phenomenon, impossible to measure or verify.

As a surgeon, he said he is fully aware that he causes pain and often prescribes painkillers for short-term relief from acute pain. But he says narcotics are not the best way to treat chronic pain. Over time, patients develop a tolerance to the dosages they are given, and begin to need more and more medication.

Up until the early 2000s, narcotics were seen as the front line in pain treatment.

“Everything was narcotics, narcotics, but now that we have learned what the side effects are that weren’t predicted, we are working with alternative approaches,” Dr. Pil said.

A new program at the Island hospital gives patients an alternative to pills. The Center for Pain Medicine connects Island patients with doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital, who can recommend alternative therapies for chronic pain, such as steroid injections, joint injections, trigger point injections, nerve blocks, and radio frequency lesioning, according to the hospital website.

Prescription monitoring began at the state in 1992, but only recently has this data been available to physicians.

Gosnold on Cape Cod, an addiction treatment center in Falmouth, works with physicians to raise awareness about the pitfalls of painkillers.

“It’s working with the medical field not in a punitive way, but working together to see what we can do and what they can do to help with the abuse potential,” said Lori J. McCarthy, director of clinical outreach at Gosnold, in an interview this week.

The state hopes that releasing the data will bring attention to the opiate crisis, and better inform efforts to combat it.

“The more information that people have, the more informed they are,” said Deborah S. Allwes, director of the bureau of health care safety and quality. “By having this be in the spotlight and part of the conversation, it just makes everyone more aware.”

Statewide, opioid prescriptions have leveled off in recent years, after showing an upward trend for many years.

The state is still trying to figure out how to interpret the data.

“What we don’t know is even though the number [of prescriptions] is maintaining the same, we don’t know if that is the right number to begin with,” Ms. Allwes said.

While the prescription monitoring program gives the state a preventative indicator, the fatality data shows the tragic consequences of drug availability.

“It informs the public about the magnitude of the problem and the burden on families in the state,” Mr. Land said. “The fact that we can produce this more regularly also allows us to look at underlying patterns, what types of communities, individuals, policies and programs are affected . . . so we can deliver our resources more effectively.”