Political leaders, addiction professionals, and public health officials are reacting to the troubling new data reported yesterday that a record 100,000 Americans died from drug overdose in the yearlong period ending in April—more than fatalities from car accidents and gun violence combined. Dr. Rahul Gupta, director of the Office of National Drug Policy Control, focused on the need for states to broaden the availability of overdose reversal medications like naloxone, noting that “access often depends a great deal on where you live.” Dr. Joseph E. Lee, chief executive of the Hazelden BettyFord Foundation, blamed the increase in deaths in part on the “community and social support that was lost during the pandemic,” as treatment providers struggled to maintain services. The numbers for the past year are grim, reflecting not only barriers to treatment that arose during the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns but also the influx of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is increasingly found in counterfeit pills made to look like oxycodone or Xanax and sold by street dealers. There’s little hope that the current situation will change. “It’s telling us that 2021 looks like it will be worse than 2021,” predicted Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. For his part, President Biden said “we cannot overlook his epidemic of loss, which as touched families and communities across the country.” But he failed to announce any new programs or funding, and instead repeated his administration’s call to implement harm reduction strategies, which are regarded as a stop-gap measure to save lives—but not the most effective way to get substance users into drug treatment.
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Rosenthal Center for AddictIon Studies