The announcement this week by the CDC that drug overdose fatalities continue to surge—to a record 197,000 last year—has led to renewed calls for urgent action to confront the crisis. Noting that the spike in deaths was mainly due to the widespread presence of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, called the latest numbers “truly staggering.” She added that many more people who use drugs both occasionally and even adolescents are now exposed to potent substances—often through counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl—that cause someone to overdose even with a relatively small exposure.
Meanwhile, Regina LaBelle, an addiction policy expert at Georgetown University, said the nearly108,000 estimated deaths were without precedent, adding that the increase during the first year of the pandemic did not seem to be letting up. Dr. Anne Zink, the chief health official in Alaska, which saw the largest overdose death percentage increase of any state in the nation, said that fentanyl kills many overdose victims before bystanders or emergency responders can revive them with naloxone, a medication that can quickly reverse an opioid overdose. “You don’t have a second chance if you don’t immediately have naloxone available,” she said.
And finally, the White House issued a statement calling the accelerating pace of overdose deaths "unacceptable." Dr. Rahul Gupta, the first medical doctor to oversee the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said that one person dies every five minutes from overdose and noted that deaths involving methamphetamines almost tripled. He called for implementing the Biden administration's recently announced national drug control strategy, which calls for measures such as harm reduction, connecting more people to treatment, disrupting drug trafficking, and expanding access to the overdose-reversing medication naloxone.