A figure up 15% compared to the previous year. In 2021 in the United States, around 107,000 people lost their lives by overdose, according to figures published on Wednesday by American health authorities.
Of those deaths, more than 70,000 are linked to synthetic opiates like fentanyl, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
This is followed by stimulants such as methamphetamine (more than 30,000 deaths), cocaine (nearly 25,000), and natural or semi-synthetic opiates such as heroin (about 13,000). Several drugs can be involved in a death.
This is a death record for the United States where, now, a person dies of overdose every 5 minutes.
The US opioid crisis has been worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has increased the isolation of some populations, experts say. Indeed, if the increase is 15% for the year 2021, it was even stronger between 2019 and 2020 with a jump of 30%.
Joe Biden’s action plan
Fentanyl, highly addictive and cheap to manufacture, is increasingly being mixed by traffickers with other drugs, according to the US drug enforcement agency, the DEA. It is also added to counterfeit pills for sale on the internet (eg painkillers).
At the end of April, the government of Joe Biden announced an action plan to combat this crisis, focusing on two aspects: more care for dependent people and the fight against drug trafficking.
In particular, the US government wants to emphasize so-called “harm reduction” practices, such as the distribution of naloxone (an antidote capable of resuscitating a person who is overdosing), tests to verify the presence or absence of of fentanyl, or programs for exchanging used needles with clean ones.