More than 104,000 Americans died from drug overdoses within 12-month period

Two-thirds of overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids like fentanyl

More than 104,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in the year between September 2020 and September 2021, another record-high death toll that has more than doubled within six years.

Provisional reporting from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 104,288 people died from drug-related overdoses within the 12-month period that ended in September 2021, marking an increase of roughly 14,000 more deaths than the previous year.

In September 2015, roughly 52,000 people had died from overdoses in a similar timeframe.

The surge in drug-related deaths has accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic and with the proliferation of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is primarily driving the crisis.

Two-thirds of overdose deaths reported within that time involved synthetic opioids, according to federal data.

Overdose deaths increased in every US state except for Delaware, Hawaii and New Hampshire, which saw year-over-year declines.

Several states reported a dramatic increase; overdose deaths in Alaska increased by 60 per cent from the same time period in the previous year, and overdose deaths were up by 59 per cent in Vermont and 49 per cent in Kansas.

The crisis is expected to kill more than 1 million Americans within this decade without urgent mitigation efforts following years of regulatory failures, according to a February report published by Stanford University School of Medicine and The Lancet.

“The Covid pandemic cut off a lot of things that protect people,” Stanford Medicine’s Keith Humphreys said in a statement accompanying the report. “Social contact, daily structure, 12-step recovery programmes were replaced by fear, anxiety, sometimes bereavement or economic stress – things that drugs temporarily take away, that cause individuals with addiction to relapse.”

Mitigation efforts like syringe exchange programmes, overdose-reversing medicine, safe consumption sites and other harm reduction initiatives are becoming more available in some communities while facing political hurdles broadly.

“We are in the midst of a serious public health crisis that claimed over 100,000 lives in the first year of the pandemic – with Black and Indigenous people being disproportionately hard hit,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for people who use drugs and efforts to decriminalise drugs.

“We all care about our communities’ health and safety,” she said in a statement responding to White House policy on grant funding for safe smoking kits. “Harm reduction works to meet people where they are at, and keep people free of diseases and alive so they have a chance of recovery and healing.”