US drug overdose deaths hit record in 2020, CDC says

Drug overdose deaths in the United States reached a record 107,000 last year, the highest annual death toll－or one death every five minutes, and driven by illegally manufactured fentanyl and opioids, according to newly published data on Wednesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The provisional number of drug overdose deaths was up by nearly 15 percent over 2020, when there were 93,655, data from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, or NCHS, showed.

At least two-thirds of the fatal overdoses involved a person using fentanyl or another synthetic opioid. Overdose deaths from fentanyl were 71,238, a rise of 23 percent in 2020.

Alaska saw a 75 percent increase in deaths caused by drug overdoses last year－the largest jump of any state.

"It is unacceptable that we are losing a life to overdose every five minutes around the clock," said Rahul Gupta, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, in a statement.

In the US, drug overdose deaths have been rising for at least two decades. The increase began in the 1990s, caused by opioid and heroin abuse.

Over the past several years, more drug overdose deaths have been attributed to illicit fentanyl, a highly addictive drug. Deaths from fentanyl climbed even higher amid the stress brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, research shows.

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told CNN: "This is indeed a continuation of an awful trend. Rates of overdose deaths have been on an upward climb for decades now, increasing at unprecedented rates right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US."

The number of drug overdose deaths was 50 percent higher last year than in 2019, the CDC said. Between 2019 and 2020, overdose deaths rose by 30 percent.

Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at NCHS, told The Wall Street Journal that he had "never seen anything like this "when it comes to the rise in deaths due to fentanyl. Approximately 50 times the strength of heroin, fentanyl has created havoc across the US during the opioid crisis.

In its legal form, the drug is vetted by the Food and Drug Administration and was initially a strong pain medication prescribed to people with cancer.

But a deadlier illicit form of the drug made in Mexico by drug cartels is smuggled through the US border in vehicles and later sold on the streets.

"The synthetic opioid fentanyl has injected itself throughout our whole country. It's everywhere," Volkow said. Deaths from cocaine and methamphetamines also rose last year, CDC data showed. There were nearly 33,000 deaths from meth, a rise of 34 percent over 2020.