Overdose deaths continued to rise in 2021, reaching historic highs

Containers of pills and prescription medication are boxed for disposal during the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 20th Nationwide Prescription Drug Take Back Day on April 24, 2021. Virtually 108,000 men and women died in 2021 from drug overdoses.

PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP through Getty Photographs

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PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP by means of Getty Images

Containers of drugs and prescription medicine are boxed for disposal in the course of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 20th Nationwide Prescription Drug Choose Back again Working day on April 24, 2021. Just about 108,000 people died in 2021 from drug overdoses.

PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP by way of Getty Visuals

New provisional information released by the federal governing administration estimates that just about 108,000 persons died from drug overdoses from January to December, 2021.

“That is about a 15% raise from the quantity of deaths in 2020,” states Farida Ahmad, a research scientist with the Centre for Disorder Regulate and Prevention’s Countrywide Heart for Overall health Stats. Just about 94,000 died in 2020.

The 12 months-to-12 months rise in overdose fatalities was considerably larger from 2019 to 2020, leaping by a historic 30%. While the increase in fatalities slowed down in 2021, the complete quantity of deaths is however the maximum once-a-year overdose deaths ever recorded in the U.S.

“In excess of 80,000 of those people deaths concerned opioids, which was about a 15% improve from final calendar year,” states Ahmad.

And a lot more than 71,000 of all opioid related fatalities concerned illegally made fentanyl, which in current yrs has been combined in with a range of illicit medication.

“These previous 3 a long time we have observed an increase of contamination of other illicit medication with fentanyl, be it cocaine, be methamphetamine, and a lot more a short while ago, illicit prescription drugs,” suggests Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

This has set a even larger inhabitants of drug customers at possibility of overdoses, she adds. “In quite a few instances, these may perhaps be folks that take just one particular pill and they get that contaminated capsule and they can die.”

That includes teenagers, she adds, who have until recently been less likely to die from an overdose. A modern analyze showed that for the 1st time in a decade, the selection of teenagers who died from overdoses rose in 2020. Volkow and other addiction researchers think it’s principally mainly because fentanyl is starting to be increasingly additional into counterfeit prescription prescription drugs, which are popular between this age team.

“It really is certainly devastating and heartbreaking that we continue to continue being in this situation,” claims Sheila Vakharia, deputy director of investigate and tutorial engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance, an dependancy coverage advocacy team. “We are above 20 several years in this overdose crisis and there is certainly no indication of any kind of slowing down of deaths. If just about anything, matters have only seemed to have gotten far more dire.”

In April, the Biden administration announced its ideas to tackle the mounting number of overdose deaths, which include rising entry to damage reduction techniques like Naloxone, the medicine that reverses overdoses.

Vakharia claims she was heartened to see this sort of “historic” investments in enhancing accessibility to damage reduction measures.

“Harm reduction has historically been incredibly underfunded and has been relegated to point out and regional funding or private funding to sustain alone,” she states.

However, a whole lot extra demands to come about to tackle the scale of the problem, she provides. There are now just “two lawfully working above-the-ground hurt reduction overdose prevention facilities in the state,” at a time when communities across the nation will need them, she says.

“And so I believe that all of our endeavours going ahead can surely be further increased, can be even more amplified and further ramped up,” she provides.