Overdose deaths in nation hit a record 93,000 last year
That estimate far eclipses the previous record of about 72,000 drug overdose deaths, reached the previous year, and amounts to a 29% increase.
“This is a staggering loss of human life,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University public health researcher who tracks overdose trends.
The nation was already struggling with its worst overdose epidemic, but clearly “COVID has greatly exacerbated the crisis,” he said.
Lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions isolated those with drug addictions and made treatment harder to get, experts said.
Jordan McGlashen died of a drug overdose in his Ypsilanti, Mich., apartment May 6, 2020, the day before his 39th birthday.
“It was really difficult for me to think about the way in which Jordan died,” said his younger brother, Collin McGlashen, who wrote openly about his brother’s addiction in an obituary. “He was alone, and suffering emotionally and felt like he had to use again.”
Jordan McGlashen’s death was attributed to heroin and fentanyl.
Though prescription painkillers once drove the nation’s overdose epidemic, they were supplanted first by heroin and then by fentanyl, a dangerously powerful opioid, in recent years. Fentanyl was developed to treat intense pain from ailments such as cancer but has increasing been sold illicitly and mixed with other drugs.
“What’s really driving the surge in overdoses is this increasingly poisoned drug supply,” said Shannon Monnat, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University who researches geographic patterns in overdoses. “Nearly all of this increase is fentanyl contamination in some way. Heroin is contaminated. Cocaine is contaminated. Methamphetamine is contaminated.”
Fentanyl was involved in more than 60% of the overdose deaths last year, data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest.
There’s no current evidence that more Americans started using drugs last year, Monnat said. Rather, the increased deaths most likely were people who had already been struggling with addiction. Some have told her research team that suspensions of evictions and extended unemployment benefits left them with more money than usual. And they said “when I have money, I stock up on my [drug] supply,” she said.
Overdose deaths are just one facet of what was overall the deadliest year in U.S. history. With about 378,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19, the nation saw more than 3.3 million deaths.
The CDC reviewed death certificates to come up with the estimate for 2020 drug overdose deaths. The tally of over 93,000 such deaths translates to an average of more than 250 a day, or roughly 11 every hour.
The increase of 21,000 is the biggest year-to-year jump since the count rose by 11,000 in 2016.
As a historical comparison, according to the CDC, there were fewer than 7,200 total U.S. overdose deaths reported in 1970, when a heroin epidemic was raging in U.S. cities. There were about 9,000 in 1988, around the height of the crack epidemic.
The CDC reported that drug overdoses in 2020 increased in all but two states, New Hampshire and South Dakota.
Kentucky’s overdose count rose 54% last year to more than 2,100, from under 1,400 the year before. There were also large increases in South Carolina, West Virginia and California, which saw a 46% rise, from 6,538 to 9,538. Vermont had the largest jump, 58%, but much smaller numbers, 118 to 186.
The proliferation of fentanyl is one reason some experts do not expect any substantial decline in drug overdose deaths this year. Data from some states seem to support their pessimism. Rhode Island, for example, reported 34 overdose deaths in January and 37 in February — the most for those months in at least five years.
For Collin McGlashen, last year was “an incredibly dark time” that began in January with the cancer death of the family’s beloved patriarch.
Their father’s death sent his musician brother Jordan into a tailspin, McGlashen said.
“Someone can be doing really well for so long and then, in a flash, deteriorate,” he said.
Then came the pandemic. Jordan lost his job. “It was kind of a final descent.”
