Daniel Ciccarone, a drug policy expert at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests “there appears to be some substitution going on,” with a number of people who use illicit drugs turning to methamphetamines or other options to try to stay away from fentanyl and fentanyl-tainted drugs.Ĭiccarone said he believes overdose deaths finally will trend down. Overdose deaths are often attributed to more than one drug some people take multiple drugs and officials say inexpensive fentanyl is increasingly cut into other drugs, often without the buyers’ knowledge. There also was a 11% increase in deaths involving cocaine and a 3% increase in deaths involving meth and other stimulants. About 75,000, up 4% from the year before. Last year, most overdose deaths continued to be linked to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. A year later, the more lethal fentanyl and its close cousins became the biggest drug killer. “We’re catching up and the tide’s turning - slowly,” said Kanter, whose state has one of the nation’s highest overdose death rates.īeginning in the mid-1990s, abuse of prescription opioid painkillers was to blame for deaths before a gradual turn to heroin, which in 2015 caused more deaths than prescription painkillers or other drugs. Joseph Kanter, the state health officer for Louisiana, where overdose deaths fell 4% last year. Plus, the stigma that kept drug users from seeking help - and some doctors and police officers from helping them - is waning, said Dr. State officials cited various factors for the decline, like social media and health education campaigns to warn the public about the dangers of drug use expanded addiction treatment - including telehealth - and wider distribution of the overdose-reversing medication naloxone. Some of these states had some of the highest overdose death rates during the epidemic, which Keyes said might be a sign that years of concentrated work to address the problem is paying off.
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