Between 2016 and 2021, a period encompassing the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rates of drug overdose deaths in the US surged by 279 per cent.
Nearly 70,000 people died from fentanyl-linked drug overdoses in 2021 alone, marking a nearly four-fold increase in fentanyl-linked deaths within five years, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fatal overdoses from any drug reached more than 108,000 in 2021. Roughly two-thirds of all overdose deaths now involve fentanyl, according to the CDC.
That pandemic-era surge in the number of fentanyl-related drug overdose deaths has disproportionately impacted Black Americans and American Indians and Alaskan Natives, underscoring growing racial disparities in drug treatment, prevention and access to a toxic illicit drug supply.
Between 2016 and 2021, the rate of overdose deaths involving fentanyl spiked from 5.7 deaths per 100,000 people to 21.6 per 100,000, according to the report.
In 2021, the rate of fentanyl overdose deaths among American Indians/Alaska Natives was 33.1 per 100,000, followed by a rate of 31.3 per 100,000 among Black Americans.
“The numbers tell us that we have a lot to do,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, speaking to Politico.
The overdose crisis has prompted varied responses from local, state and federal officials, from expanding access to the overdose-reversing drug narcan to efforts to combat drug trafficking.
But the true scale and scope of the crisis – revolving around a pain-relieving synthetic opioid that dominates an illicit drug market and is often used to adulterate others – has been difficult to measure.
A system for coding overdose deaths does not distinguish between specific drugs, making it difficult to monitor trends. The CDC’s latest report, however, reviews death certificate records from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System.
The report parses out data from overdose deaths linked to fentanyl as well as cocaine, heroin, oxycodone and methamphetamine, providing a better study of the rates of overdose-related deaths relative to the drug that cause them, and potentially offering a more-accurate tool for shaping a public health crisis that kills more than 100,00 Americans every year.
“We need to know exactly what people are dying from so we know what services they need to stay alive,” according to Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Addictions, Drug & Alcohol Institute, speaking to CNN.
The mounting crisis also is compounded by an epidemic of social isolation, economic pressure and a lack of access to substance abuse treatment during the pandemic, a period that also saw Americans’ life expectancy drop to its lowest level in nearly 30 years.
But within the same period reviewed by the CDC, overdose deaths linked to methamphetamine quadrupled from 2.1 deaths per 100,000 people in 2016 to 9.6 per 100,000 in 2021, while deaths related to cocaine more than doubled from 3.5 per 100,000 to 7.9 per 100,000 over the same period.
Dr Allison Lin, an addiction psychiatrist at University of Michigan Medical School, told ABC News that while fentanyl-linked deaths have dominated headlines and rocked communities across the US, deadly epidemics from other drugs have not disappeared.
“It doesn’t mean that we’ve ever addressed the crack epidemic, I would say, and we also have a rising meth epidemic in the country as well and everything is just made worse [because] these [is] not just single [a] substance that people are using anymore,” she said. “They’re really oftentimes combined with fentanyl.”
