Overdose is now the No. 1 cause of death for people under 40 in most states. Street fentanyl is mostly to blame

 

In most states, the number of Americans under 40 who died from accidental drug overdoses has exceeded any other cause of death. "It's now the top cause in 37 states," a new Stateline analysis shows. Death rates for Americans under 40 "were up by nearly a third in 2021 over 2018, and last year were still 21% higher," reports Tim Henderson of Stateline. "Covid-19 was a small part of the increase, causing about 23,000 deaths total between 2018 and 2022 in the age group. . . . Vehicle accidents and suicide (about 96,000 each) and gun homicide (about 65,000) all took a cumulative toll from 2018 to 2022, according to a Stateline analysis of federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. . . . Overdose deaths, however, took almost 177,000 lives in that time."

A lethal dose of fentanyl
(FDA fentanyl fact sheet photo)

The number of unintentional overdose deaths shows fentanyl's deadly presence in U.S. street drugs. The "fresh wave of overdose deaths is different from the first three," Henderson writes, . . ."driven by drugs spiked with powerful fentanyl." Daliah Heller, vice president of drug use initiatives at Vital Strategies, an international advocacy group that works on strengthening public health, told Henderson: "Somebody might think they're getting a Xanax [for anxiety], or methamphetamine or cocaine. . . They have no experience with opioids; it's not what they're expecting, and now they have a much higher risk of overdose and death." According to the Food and Drug Administration, fentanyl is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin.

To lessen fentanyl's impact, states "are responding with 'harm reduction' strategies that can include warning of the new danger of recreational drugs laced with deadly fentanyl, training and equipping people to counteract overdoses when they see them," Henderson explains. "Nationally, accidental overdoses dominated the increase in deaths in residents under 40 across racial and urban-rural divides, but many disparities exist. The increase in young overdose death rates was 154% for Black Americans, 122% for Hispanic residents and 37% for white people, yet even for white residents, they represented the largest increase. . . The largest urban areas saw increases in overdose death rates of 70%, and rural areas 64%—the largest increases in both areas for any cause of death."