New research from Stateline shows that U. S. citizens under the age of 40 remained relatively intact during the COVID-19 pandemic, but fell victim to another killer: accidental drug overdose deaths.
Death rates in this age organization increased by about a third between 2021 and 2018, and last year were still 21% higher.
COVID-19 accounts for only a small part of this increase, causing around 23,000 deaths in total between 2018 and 2022 in this age group, which includes millennials (born in the early 80s), Generation Z (born in the late 90s) and children. Car accidents and suicides (about 96,000 each) and gun food homicides (about 65,000) had cumulative victims between 2018 and 2022, according to a study of Stateline data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, overdose deaths claimed the lives of approximately 177,000 more people at the time.
Accidental overdoses are the leading cause of death in thirteen states for people under 40, surpassing suicide in nine states and traffic injuries in five others; it is now the leading cause in 37 states, plus Kentucky. The only other replacement occurred in Mississippi, where homicides have become the leading cause of death, surpassing auto injuries. In 40 states and the District of Columbia, overdoses are the leading cause of death. in deaths among other young people.
States are responding to skyrocketing death rates with “harm reduction” methods that can be accompanied by caution about the new danger of recreational drugs combined with lethal fentanyl, education and equipment for others to counter overdoses when they see them, and even questionable sites of supervised drug use. . to ensure the protection of drug addicts.
A “wonderful fourth wave” of accidental overdose deaths caused by drugs fortified with potent fentanyl is sweeping away young Americans, said Daliah Heller, vice president of drug use projects at Vital Strategies, a foreign public health advocacy organization.
Prescription opioids led to an increase in drug addiction between 2000 and 2016, then when supply dwindled in reaction to law enforcement, users turned to heroin, artificial opioids and finally fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin and easier. to download the pandemic. Heller said.
Jonathan Diehl of Silver Spring, Maryland, died in 2019 at the age of 28 after a heroin he probably didn’t know was enriched with fentanyl, said his mother, Cristina Rabadan-Diehl. Jonathan Diehl earned a degree in structural control and was starting a promising career. New heating and cooling task 4 days before his death, his mother said.
“I think Jonathan’s trajectory is very common,” said Rabadan-Diehl, who now works as a substance use disorder counselor. “He started with opioid pills, and when the government started imposing restrictions on prescriptions, he and millions and millions of Americans entered the illegal market. And then came fentanyl.
Now, a new wave of overdose deaths, aside from the first three, is fueled by the incorporation of fentanyl into all kinds of recreational drugs and pandemic isolation that has led to more solitary drug use, Heller said.
“Someone might think they’re taking Xanax [for anxiety], methamphetamine or cocaine,” Heller said. “They’re not delighted by opioids, it’s not what they expect and now they’re at a much higher risk of overdose and death. “. »
Authorities classify overdose deaths as a twist of fate or suicide based on individual investigations of the cases surrounding each death.
The states facing the most youth mortality, most commonly from accidental overdoses, include New Mexico, which has eclipsed West Virginia and Mississippi since 2018 for having the nation’s highest death rate for people under 40 — about 188 deaths per 100,000, an increase of 43. . % since 2018.
Other states with higher death rates for this age group are West Virginia (170 deaths per 100,000), Louisiana and Mississippi (164), and Alaska (163).
In Kentucky, the death rate for people under 40 is 142. 3 per 100,000. Drug overdoses were the leading cause of death among Kentuckians in this age group in 2018 and 2022. Among all age groups last year in Kentucky, fatal overdoses dropped in five consecutive years. Concent, from 2,250 deaths in 2021 to 2,135 in 2022, according to the state. This is the first decline in overdose deaths since 2018.
In New Mexico, where accidental overdoses have become the leading cause of death among people under 40 in 2022, surpassing suicide and rising 90 percent to 394 deaths since 2018, the problem of overdoses has been concentrated in poverty-stricken rural areas such as Rio. Arriba County, on the border with Colorado.
Democratic state Rep. Tara Lujan, who has relatives in the county, sponsored the damage repair bill enacted last year. This law adds to legislation in many other states that comes with widespread distribution of naloxone to combat overdoses, legalized testing devices for deadly additives like fentanyl. and smart Samaritan legislation that allows friends to report overdoses without legal consequences for their own drug use.
Lujan hopes to reintroduce a bill that would create overdose prevention centers or harm relief centers where drugs can be consumed in a supervised environment. The bill died in committee this year after Republicans called the concept a “state-sponsored drug den. “
“These are all problems that existed before the pandemic, but the pandemic has been completely derailed,” Luján said. However, we don’t need them to die. “
Only New York City has two of these services in operation, controlled through advocates; The sites claim to have effectively reversed the overdoses. But federal law enforcement agencies threaten to shut them down without an express state warrant because they are otherwise subject to a federal law prohibiting operations that allow illegal drug use at the site.
In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last year vetoed legislation that would have allowed jurisdictions to open supervised injection sites, saying it “could lead to a number of unintended consequences” in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland.
“The worsening of drug use disorders in these spaces is a threat we can address,” Newsom wrote in a veto message.
Rhode Island is the only state to pass a law allowing supervised drug use sites as a pilot assignment in 2021, but it has yet to open any centers. The new law introduced this year would delay the expiration of the pilot allocation from 2024 to 2026. .
Bills on the same subject, supervised drug intake sites, were being considered this year in Colorado, Illinois and New York, but they passed.
In a sign of the effect on young people, a Massachusetts bill would have required all dorm assistants at state universities to receive naloxone education to prevent overdose, but the allocation stalled.
New Hampshire is one of many states experimenting with vans that know where drugs are used and offer materials and tips for overdose prevention.
The lowest death rates among young people in 2022 occurred in Hawaii (78 deaths per 100,000), Massachusetts and Rhode Island (79), and Utah and New Jersey (80). Massachusetts and New Jersey were the only states to see a reduction. In the total number of deaths of people under 40 since 2018, and a decrease in overdose deaths was also observed, overdoses remain the leading cause of death among other young people in both states.
Nationally, accidental overdoses have led to increased deaths among citizens under 40, regardless of racial and urban-rural divides, but many disparities exist. The increase in overdose death rates among young people is 154% for black Americans, 122% for Hispanic citizens and 37% for whites, but even among white citizens they accounted for the largest increase.
Larger urban spaces saw a 70% increase in overdose death rates and rural spaces 64% – the largest increases in both spaces for all reasons of death.
Across all races and age groups, overdose death rates are highest among men and slowed in 2017 but resumed after 2018 and spiked during the pandemic through 2021, according to a summary of data from the federal National Center for Health Statistics released last year.
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