Federal and local officials nationwide report alarming spikes in drug overdoses during the COVID-19 pandemic, confirming anecdotal evidence that the social isolation, economic losses and lack of access to treatment experienced during the lockdown are having a tragic impact on substance abusers.
While final numbers are not yet available, suspected overdoses—not all of them fatal—jumped 18 percent in March, 29 percent in April and 42 percent in May, according to a federal tracking program. In Milwaukee County, dispatch calls for overdoses have increased more than 50 percent. Health professionals had reckoned with an uptick in overdoses, prompted in part by social distancing that can trigger relapse and the closing of many treatment centers, drug courts and rehab facilities for financial and safety reasons.
What’s needed now is emergency funding to ensure services remain available and recovery centers stay open in this critical time. Meanwhile, an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry looks at the issue of using cannabis for treating chronic pain. Although marijuana has shown some promise in this regard, more evidence is required for it to be used safely and more widely in clinical practice—as chronic use of marijuana carries the risk of a patient developing cannabis use disorder.
And finally, city officials in Boulder, Colorado have imposed a hefty 40 percent sales tax on e-cigarettes as part of a more comprehensive initiative to curb an epidemic of teen vaping and nicotine use. It has also banned the sale of flavored vaping products, after public health authorities estimated that 33 percent of high school students in the city vaped.