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 U.S. deaths from drug overdoses leapt nearly 30% to more than 93,000
in 2020 - the highest ever recorded.
"During the pandemic, a lot of (drug) programs weren't able to
operate. Street-level outreach was very difficult. People were very
isolated," said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a health policy expert at
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
Arman Maddela, 24, recognizes he was at risk of being among those
who died. A recovering addict, he relapsed during the pandemic and
was using fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 80-100 times stronger
than morphine, and heroin.
"It's so easy to pass away from using drugs nowadays, just because
of the amount of fentanyl out there. A lot of people in the past
were able to relapse and come back. But nowadays, that's not the
case," he said.
He checked himself into rehab a second time in October. "I actually
know quite a few people personally that have unfortunately passed
away since then from overdose," said Maddela, who lives in
Encinitas, California.
While overdose deaths were already increasing in the months
preceding the COVID-19 outbreak, the latest data show a stark
acceleration during the pandemic.
Social distancing reduced access to programs that offer needle
exchange, opioid substitution therapy or safe injection sites where
observers could deploy the overdose antidote Narcan, leaving many
addicts to die alone.
Moreover, during stay-at-home orders, addicts were unable to attend
support group meetings in person or visit their therapists for live
one-on-one sessions.
Pandemic lockdowns and distancing likely contributed to the rise in
overdose deaths in less obvious ways, too.
Isolation is known as a factor in anxiety and depression, said Kate
Judd, program director at Shoreline Recovery Center, the San Diego
rehab facility that treated Maddela. Those feelings can lead to drug
abuse.
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The drugs themselves became more deadly as well.
Drug suppliers more frequently mixed fentanyl
with cocaine and methamphetamine to boost their
effects, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National
Institutes of Health.
"The type of drugs that are now available are
much more dangerous," Volkow said. Closing
national borders did not staunch the flow of
fentanyl as hoped. Instead, it accelerated.
The deadly combination of events resulted in
93,331 overdose deaths in the 12 months ended in
December 2020, compared with an estimated 72,151
deaths in 2019, according to provisional data
from the National Center for Health Statistics,
part of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
The data showed opioids were involved in 74.7%
of overdose deaths, rising to 69,710 in 2020
from 50,963 in 2019.
"We do know the primary driver of the increase
(in deaths) involves synthetic opioids,
primarily fentanyl," Bob Anderson, chief of the
Mortality Statistics Branch at the health
statistics center, said.
Most U.S. states were swept by the trend,
Anderson said, with the highest increases in
overdose deaths seen in Vermont, up 57.6%;
followed by Kentucky, up 54%; South Carolina, up
52%; West Virginia, up nearly 50%; and
California, up 46%.
On a day-to-day basis, Sharfstein estimates that
the United States is now seeing more overdose
deaths than COVID-19 deaths.
"This is a different kind of crisis, and it's
not going to go away as quickly."
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and
Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California,
additional reporting by Mrinalika Roy in
Bengaluru; Editing by Caroline Humer and Cynthia
Osterman)
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