May 17, 2022
More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. last year—a 15 percent increase from 2020—due in large part to the spread of illegal fentanyl throughout the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Health officials blamed the increase on the proliferation of a synthetic form of the drug as well as the COVID-19 lockdowns which sucked the joy out of people’s lives, destroyed businesses, extended mental illness pressures and prevented potential and already addicted drug users from obtaining the help they needed.
The CDC said about two-thirds of those deaths involved fentanyl or some type of another synthetic opioid.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Robert Anderson, the chief of the mortality-statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told the paper.
About 14,000 more Americans died from overdose deaths in 2021 compared to 2020.
Katherine Keyes, an associate professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told CNN in February that easing Covid-19 restrictions would not spur an immediate rebound when it comes to drug use in the community.
“You won’t see a reversal in the same way you saw the acceleration because these drug distribution networks and addiction become embedded in the community. And it’s not like they turn off overnight,” she said.
Alaska experienced the largest percentage increase in overdose deaths in 2021, Axios reported. The state saw a 75.3 percent jump in deaths.
Dr. Rahul Gupta, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the website, “It is unacceptable that we are losing a life to overdose every five minutes around the clock.”
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