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Thursday, July 15th, 2021

Drug Deaths Spiked by 30 Percent Last Year, Surpassing 90,000

Author:     Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     July 14, 2021
 Link: Drug Deaths Spiked by 30 Percent Last Year, Surpassing 90,000
Stephan:   While everyone has been focused on Covid, the opioid pandemic has drifted into obscurity. But it has not gone away; quite the opposite. This death crisis is the result, in my opinion, of the inferiority of the illness profit system. Other countries do not have death rates like this. And why does it happen? You're broke, you lost your job, you've got two kids, You're down to electricity or food. You have no health insurance. Opiates give relief, you retreat into them because you feel powerless and see no options. This is a failure of America's social structure which makes profit the only priority. The healthcare bill Biden is trying to get passed will help, and I think opioid deaths will go down.

As Covid raged, so did the country’s other epidemic. Drug overdose deaths rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 to a record 93,000, according to preliminary statistics released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s the largest single-year increase recorded.

The deaths rose in every state but two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, with pronounced increases in the South and West.

Several grim records were set: the most drug overdose deaths in a year; the most deaths from opioid overdoses; the most overdose deaths from stimulants like methamphetamine; the most deaths from the deadly class of synthetic opioids known as fentanyls.

“It’s huge, it’s historic, it’s unheard of, unprecedented, and a real shame,” said Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies heroin markets. “It’s a complete shame.”

In recent years, annual drug overdose deaths had already eclipsed the peak yearly deaths from car crashes, gun violence or the AIDS epidemic.

The death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 375,000 last year, the largest American mortality event in a century, but drug deaths were experienced disproportionately […]

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2 Comments

  1. Rev. Dean on Thursday, July 15, 2021 at 10:04 am

    When it is seen as a preventable disease instead of an incarceration type of problem we will get better control of it. I believe it was Portugal that made all drugs legal and that made their death rate from overdose go way down because of their methodology of treating the symptoms that lead to overdosing.

    • Rev. Dean on Sunday, July 18, 2021 at 6:27 am

      P.S.: I think it was Portugal (I could be wrong) which legalized all drugs and the practically eliminated overdoses because they put in place a non-incarceration system and replaced it with a recovery system based upon wellbeing.