Drug Overdose Deaths Hit Record-High in 2021, CDC Data Show
Deaths from drug overdoses rose to an all-time high of more than 107,000 in 2021, according to preliminary data released by the CDC on Wednesday.
The 15 percent increase from the year before follows an even bigger increase in 2020, when drug overdose deaths jumped 30 percent.
Overdoses were one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. last year, on par with the number of people who died from diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. Overdoses killed about a quarter as many Americans last year as Covid-19, which was the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, called the CDC data “truly staggering,” according to the Associated Press.
Overdose deaths often involve more than one drug and officials say fentanyl increasingly appears in other drugs without the buyers’ knowledge, according to the report. A recent study found that a large share of illicit pills seized by drug enforcement authorities that had been marketed as OxyContin, Xanax or Adderall actually contained fentanyl.
“The net effect is that we have many more people, including those who use drugs occasionally and even adolescents, exposed to these potent substances that can cause someone to overdose even with a relatively small exposure,” Volkow said in a statement.
The new data comes after White House drug czar Dr. Rahul Gupta announced President Biden’s national drug control strategy and a plan to combat meth use. The strategy calls for measures like helping more people get treatment, disrupting drug trafficking and increasing access to the overdose-reversing medication naloxone.
“It is unacceptable that we are losing a life to overdose every five minutes around the clock,” Gupta said in a statement on Wednesday.
Kelly Dougherty, Vermont’s deputy health commissioner, told the New York Times state officials have begun a new public messaging to tell people to assume that fentanyl is everywhere in the state where 93 percent of opioid deaths were fentanyl-related.
“In the beginning stages of the pandemic, we were attributing the increase to life being disrupted,” she told the outlet. “What is really the primary driver is the presence of fentanyl in the drug supply.”
Deaths involving synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, jumped from 58,000 to 71,000 in 2021. Meanwhile, deaths involving stimulants such as methamphetamine also increased to 33,000 from 25,000.
While the pandemic led to increased social isolation and economic dislocation that tend to cause relapses in drug use, experts told the New York Times that the pandemic alone does not explain the trend.
The chief health official in Alaska, Dr. Anne Zink, told the outlet the difference in overdose deaths is not due to a huge increase in usage but rather that the fentanyl supply had skyrocketed. Alaska saw a 75 percent increase in drug overdose deaths in 2021 — the largest jump of any state.
