Fentanyl overdose deaths: Americans are overdosing on a drug they didn’t know they were taking
That’s a monstrous new record for drug-related deaths – up nearly 30% year-over-year and nearly doubling in the past five years.
The drug epidemic developed in tandem with the Covid-19 pandemic, which claimed the lives of about 509,000 people during the same period.
Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl – a painkiller 50-100 times more potent than morphine – account for the majority of drug-related deaths: about 64,000.
Epidemic Play a role. Dr Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse: “In a crisis as severe as this, people who have already taken drugs may take higher amounts and those who are recovering may relapse. . It’s a phenomenon that we’ve seen and might have predicted,” he told CNN.
Enough fentanyl to kill 333 million people. Read this line from the CNN report: The US government has seized enough fentanyl this year to give every American a lethal dose, Drug Enforcement Administration Manager Anne Milgram said Wednesday at a White House press conference. , called the US overdose epidemic “a national crisis” that “knows no geographical boundaries” and that it continues to get worse. “
Small amounts of 2 milligrams can be deadly, and they’re often cut off with Oxycontin, fake Percocet, or other drugs.
Who is dying? A Google search yielded scores of stories like the following:
- There is a 28-year-old man in Northern California died after taking a fake painkiller contains fentanyl.
- Yes Unsupervised 11-month-old baby in North Carolina who died from an overdose of fentanyl. Her mother and grandmother are facing charges. (While searching Google for specific fentanyl deaths, I saw reports of lots of toddlers ingesting their parents’ medication: A 15 months old father calculated in his overdose death in Southern California. ONE The mother of a 1-year-old in Alabama was arrested after the child overdosed.)
- Has family of an Alabama inmate dies of an overdose of fentanyl but didn’t find out until months later.
- Yes teenagers outside of Los Angeles who bought what he thought was a prescription painkiller from a friend of a friend and died of fentanyl poisoning.
- Yes 25 year old woman in Las Vegas who thought she bought Percocet but died after taking fake pills with fentanyl.
Stories are everywhere.
How did Fentanyl get to the US? Chemicals used to make drugs are often shipped from China to the United States or Mexico for drug cartels in Mexico to produce and then smuggled to the United States.
Medicines may be sent as small postal shipments of less than one kilogram.
Fentanyl is being mixed with other illegal drugs to increase their potency, sold as powders and nasal sprays, and increasingly pressed into pills that look like legal prescription opioids. Because there’s no formal oversight or quality control, these fake pills often contain lethal doses of fentanyl, with no drug promise.
What is President Joe Biden doing? The administration noted that it has invested $4 billion in funding from its Covid-19 relief package, known as the US Rescue Plan, to combat overdose deaths, including expanding mental health and substance use disorder treatment services.
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