While the COVID-19 pandemic raged last year and claimed an estimated 345,000 lives in the U.S., another health crisis led to 93,000 additional deaths: overdoses.
Preliminary data shows that deaths from drug overdoses in the U.S. increased by almost 30 percent last year – approximately 21,000 more lives lost from overdoses than the previous year – through the height of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Washington Post, experts paying attention to the drug epidemic were not surprised by these findings.
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“Every one of those people, somebody loved them,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatry professor at Stanford University and an expert on addiction and drug policy, said. “It’s terrifying. It’s the biggest increase in overdose deaths in the history of the United States, it’s the worst overdose crisis in the history of the United States, and we’re not making progress. It’s really overwhelming.”
Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, which spread quickly across the globe last year, an opioid epidemic has been steadily gaining steam since the late 1990s and it contributes to increasing overdoses. By 2019, nearly 500,000 people in the U.S. had died of opioid-related overdoses.
“In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to opioid pain relievers and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates,” leading to widespread misuse, explained the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The department declared the epidemic a health emergency in 2017 and announced a five-point strategy to combat it. Even so, there was a more than 6 percent increase in opioid-related overdose deaths just two years later.
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There have been three waves of the epidemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Prescription of opioids in the 90s triggered the first wave, a second wave of heroin-related deaths began in 2010 and a third wave in 2013 included deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
In recent years, fentanyl has been driving the fatal overdose death toll, said the Washington Post. Legally, fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid analgesic 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine used to manage patients after surgery or those in severe pain. Illegally, the drug is often mixed with heroin or cocaine to produce euphoric effects, said the CDC.
Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said that fentanyl is pervasive in the country’s illegal drug supply and users often do not know their drugs are laced with it. In 2020, the number of fentanyl-related deaths increased by 55 percent, she told Fox News.
According to the Washington Post, the pandemic exacerbated existing drug problems for a number of reasons, including: limited and stretched health care resources, difficult-to-obtain anti-addiction medication, housing instability, stress and isolation, among others. Many health care experts also took their attention away from drug abuse to focus on the pandemic, said the outlet.
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However, there is hope. The Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control will hold a hearing next week on how to move forward against the drug crisis and the White House has said dealing with the overdose epidemic is a priority.
Additionally, Volkow said that some decisions made during the pandemic, such as the Biden administration’s ease of restrictions on medication for addicts, are a step in the right direction.
Providing “medications for opioid use disorder for everyone who needs them, with no restrictions on cost or availability,” is important, she said. Dr. Akhil Anand, addiction psychiatrist at Cleveland Clinic, told Fox News that consistent long-term care is another key factor in treating any addiction.
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