More than 100,000 Americans die every year from a drug overdose in the United States. In the 12-month period ended in September 2023, 111,380 Americans had died. As recently as 2015 the number of Americans overdosing was less than half of recent figures, although that’s no small number either. Overdose deaths had risen to about 70,000 just prior to the covid pandemic. Covid appears to be a catalyst that spurred more drug use, resulting in the number of deaths skyrocketing.
Opioids, specifically fentanyl, are most often the cause of overdose deaths. The RAND Corporation released a study that found that 42% of American adults personally know someone who died by overdose. Furthermore, of those four-in-ten adults who know someone who died of an overdose the average number of people they know who died is two.
Athey and her colleagues at RAND surveyed more than 2,000 adults in February and March
2023 on how many people throughout their lives they knew personally who died by overdose.
About 58% of survey respondents said zero, 19% said one person, and another 19% said about two to five people. Around 4% said at least six people.
Consider the above paragraph for a moment. Nearly one-quarter of people surveyed personally know two or more people who have died from a drug overdose. People who use drugs tend to cluster. One drug user knows another drug user, while their respective friends and loved ones are also acquaintances. It makes me wonder if one victim didn’t introduce others to the drugs that later killed them. The survey was of adults, children were not included in the survey.
Drug overdoses are up substantially in recent years because of the flood of fentanyl coming into the country from Mexico. Fentanyl is thought to have been initially produced in China and sold to Mexican cartels. Now it is believed that cartels merely buy precursor chemicals from China and product the drug locally. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin and about 100 times stronger than morphine. That means It’s both more deadly and more easily smuggled into the country.
Both rural and urban areas experience overdoses. Researchers suspect that urban density may increase deaths due to drug users having easier access to drug suppliers. A resident of one rural New England area told a researcher (unaffiliated with the RAND study) that “I’ve been to more of my friends’ funerals than I’ve been to my friends’ weddings.” Some of the results are what you would expect while others are counterintuitive:
Among the adults in the RAND survey who have lost someone to overdose, only about 10% said the death had little effect on their life. The remaining adults said the deaths did affect them in some way.
The survey also found that being exposed to an overdose death was more common among women than men, married adults than single adults, people born in the US than immigrants and people living in urban settings than those in rural settings.
Researchers noted that overdose deaths varied by region. In their survey, New England and the central region of the Southeast were the hardest hit. The opioid epidemic has ravaged states like Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
After an overdose death, loved ones often feel continuous guilt and think they could have done more to help. This impact is not talked about enough, according to Kleinschmidt.
Those whose loved ones died are often left with a sense of guilt and wonder what they could have done to prevent it. They sometimes wonder whether they missed the telltale signs of drug use. The conventional wisdom is that all overdose deaths are preventable, but you could probably make the same blanket statement about fatal auto accidents. Though not necessarily covered in the study the reality is that the people who most easily can avoid overdose deaths are the victims themselves. The risk of experimenting with deadly substances of unknown provenance should be enough to deter people from taking the risk. The best intervention is probably education.
Read more about the RAND study: More Than 40 Percent of Americans Know Someone Who Died of Drug Overdose; 13 Percent Say Deaths Have Disrupted Their Lives | RAND
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