As President Joe Biden and San Francisco Mayor London Breed each announced a plan to address the nation’s drug overdose crisis this week, new alarming data was released about fentanyl-related deaths.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid typically used to treat patients with severe pain, including those who just went through surgery or who have certain forms of cancer. It is 50 to 100 times more powerful than street morphine.
It has been found in a number of street drugs, including heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine in recent years.
According to the data released Thursday, synthetic opioids were responsible for enough fatalities in the 12-month period ending this May to land the drugs on the most recent top 10 list of leading causes of death in the U.S.
“It’s worth noting that the vast majority of those deaths are indeed fentanyl-related, though we don’t have a specific breakout,” said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a statement sent to Audacy.
According to provisional data from the CDC, there were 64,246 estimated deaths linked to synthetic opioids in the 12 month period ending in May 2021. This is more than three of the top 10 leading causes of death in 2019: nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis (51,565); influenza and pneumonia (49,783) and intentional self-harm (47,511).
Typically, drug overdose deaths are included in the “accidents” category in the leading causes of deaths tallies, according to the CDC. In 2019, accidents were the third leading cause of death in the U.S. with 173,040 reported fatalities.
From 2018 to 2019, reported deaths related to fentanyl spiked 16 percent, said CDC data. An Audacy investigation also found that deaths related to the drug were increasing in most states this year as of this spring.
“This rise has been going up and up and is not limited to a particular region or location, you can see it emerging around 2016,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health, told Audacy earlier this year.
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In response to the growing number of fentanyl deaths, Biden Wednesday announced an “Executive Order on Imposing Sanctions on Foreign Persons Involved in the Global Illicit Drug Trade.”
“The trafficking into the United States of illicit drugs, including fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, is causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans annually, as well as countless more non-fatal overdoses with their own tragic human toll,” said Biden.
Sanctions allow for blocking all property and interests of the sanctioned person, prohibiting transfers of credit or payments, prohibiting financial institutions from making loans or providing credit, prohibiting transactions in foreign exchange and more within U.S. jurisdiction.
James Rauh of Akron, Ohio, founder of the Families Against Fentanyl organization, has been pushing for fentanyl to be designated a Weapon of Mass Destruction since his son died of a fentanyl related overdose. An online petition set up by the organization had more than 20,000 signatures as of Saturday.
“This is a national emergency. America’s young adults, thousands of unsuspecting Americans, are being poisoned,” he said.
In 2018, two Chinese nationals were charged with “operating a conspiracy that manufactured and shipped deadly fentanyl analogues,” related to the death of Rauh’s 37-year-old Thomas, according to the Department of Justice.
Fentanyl is a significant factor in the drug overdose crisis gripping the nation. More than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the 12-month period ending this April and 64 percent were related to synthetic opioids other than methadone, the CDC said Friday.
That day, San Francisco Mayor London N. Breed declared an official State of Emergency in the Tenderloin district of the city, “to quickly address the crisis of people dying of drug overdoses on the streets of the neighborhood.”
“We are losing over two people a day to drug overdoses, mostly to fentanyl, and mostly in the Tenderloin and SoMa,” said San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney. “This is a public health emergency demanding a crisis level response, with massive urgency, coordination, and determination to confront this epidemic.”
According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, fentanyl can be pressed into pills that appear to be authentic prescription medication. These pills can have more than the lethal amount of the drug in them.
More information is available at One Pill Can Kill, the agency’s campaign about counterfeit pills.
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