Last year, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, 93,000 people died of drug overdose, according to the latest official government report. The record is 29% higher than overdose deaths in 2019, when 72,000 fatalities were reported.
“This is a huge loss of human life,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University drug overdose scientist. “We have experienced an epidemic-wide upward trend in drug overdose before, but the coronavirus pandemic has further exacerbated the crisis.”
Quarantines and other pandemic-related restrictions have left drug addicts isolated and made it much harder for them to access treatment in crisis situations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) obtained the aforementioned figure of 93,000 overdose deaths by analyzing death certificates issued last year. When broken down into shorter periods, there are on average over 250 fatalities every day, or roughly 11 every hour.
At one time, the overdose crisis was whipped up by prescription pain relievers. But in recent years they have been superseded first by heroin and then by fentanyl, a powerful and dangerous opioid designed to relieve intense pain in diseases such as cancer, but increasingly sold illegally and mixed with other drugs.
There is no evidence to suggest that more Americans have started using drugs in the past year, says Shannon Monnat, professor of sociology at Syracuse University. Most likely, people who were already suffering from drug addiction were dying. Some of them told members of the research team that the ban on evictions and continued payments of unemployment benefits left them more money than usual. And they used this surplus to buy drugs.
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“White death
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