The Deadliest Year In the History of U.S. Drug Use

While over 300,000 Americans and counting have died from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, another public-health disaster is taking more lives than ever before: drug overdoses.

Overdose deaths in 2019 were significantly higher than 2018, jumping from 67,367 deaths in 2018 to 70,630 overdose deaths in 2019, marking a nearly 5 percent increase, according to a new report issued Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If that’s not grim enough, a separate health alert published by the CDC this week reports a “concerning acceleration” in overdose deaths for 2020, which provisional data show is on track to be the deadliest year for U.S. drug overdose deaths in recorded history. Complete data for 2020 is not expected to be available until some time next year.

The CDC estimates that 81,230 drug overdose deaths occurred from June 2019 to May 2020. The largest overdose spike happened from March to May of this year, which coincides with the beginning of the pandemic when the economy collapsed, lockdowns were imposed and “social distancing” became a new way of life. In addition to unemployment and financial precarity driving up despair, public-health experts have also suggested that isolation during the pandemic has led more people to use drugs alone with no one around to revive them or call 911 if they overdose.

Pon De Re-Plate: Rihanna’s Coming Out With a Cookbook Instead of an Album Soon, and No I’m Not Crying About It, You Are

“I’m horrified by the increases across the board,” Dr. Kim Sue, a physician-anthropologist who studies addiction at Yale University’s School of Medicine, told Intelligencer. “Even before the pandemic, the U.S. was going in the wrong direction.”

Illicit fentanyl, an Über-potent opioid manufactured around the world in clandestine labs and used to adulterate heroin, is largely responsible for the soaring death rate, according to the CDC. While illicit fentanyl used to be concentrated in New England, it has rapidly spread across the Midwest and in recent years has made its way to the West Coast. In San Francisco, more people have died this year from overdoses than from COVID-19. In 2019, the city saw 441 overdose deaths compared to 621 so far this year, a 40 percent jump. Across the country, deaths are also steeply rising from stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, the CDC found, and many deaths involve a combination of different kinds of drugs, not just opioids.

America’s overdose crisis is proving to be a dynamic and ever-changing phenomenon that experts say has played out in three waves. The first wave began in the early 2000s and mainly comprised deaths from opioid pain relievers like oxycodone. After a crackdown on prescription pills, people flocked to a ballooning heroin market as pills became scarce and expensive. The third and much more deadly wave that sent the overdose rate soaring was driven primarily by powerful illicit fentanyl analogues that began to be used in heroin.

Source: The Deadliest Year In the History of U.S. Drug Use