Drug-Induced Homicide Prosecutions in the United States, 2010–2026: A Verified Case Database (Version 1.0.1)

Drug-Induced Homicide Prosecutions in the United States, 2010–2026: A Verified Case Database is a dataset of 2,930 federal and state prosecutions in which a person was sentenced for supplying drugs involved in a fatal overdose (commonly called drug-induced homicide, death-resulting or delivery-resulting-in-death cases), with dispositions from 2010 to 2026, covering all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Every record was verified against a primary source: a court record, a U.S. Department of Justice or U.S. Attorney’s Office release, or a published news report. Each record includes defendant name, jurisdiction, state, district or county, death year, disposition year, drugs involved, conduct, defendant–decedent relationship (coded from a fixed category list where the public record states it), conviction, plea or trial, sentence, sentence in months, life-sentence flag, source dataset, verification status and source URLs. Victim names are not included. Federal cases were collected systematically from Department of Justice releases, 2010–2026. State cases were collected from news and prosecutor sources and do not represent a complete count. Candidate cases were identified in part from the Health in Justice Action Lab’s drug-induced homicide dataset (Northeastern University); every record in this database was independently verified against the primary source cited. Known limitations, inclusion and exclusion criteria, field definitions and the verification method are documented in the accompanying codebook (CODEBOOK.md) and data dictionary. The dataset is maintained by G.D. Hancock, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri, author of The Criminalization of Addiction. Version 1.0.0. Later versions will add cases with pending or unresolved dispositions and expanded relationship coding. A browsable version is available at https://www.hancockonaddiction.org/research. Access to the full files is available to researchers and institutions under licence; see the access conditions.