Beyond Opioids: Rapid Increase in Drug Deaths Involving Stimulants Website
In recent years, much attention in the U.S. has been focused on the opioid crisis, which was responsible for nearly 46,000 overdose deaths in 2018. This crisis initially began to accelerate in the early 2000s with a steady rise in the abuse of prescription pain medications, and beginning around 2010, opioid deaths increasingly involved heroin. As of 2013, the ready availability of potent synthetic opioids such as fentanyl ushered in a new era of rapidly increasing opioid overdose deaths, with the total number of opioid deaths doubling between 2013 and 2018. Deaths involving synthetic opioids have continued to rise very rapidly, even as involvement of commonly prescribed prescription opioids and heroin has leveled off recently.
While attention was riveted on these troubling trends, a second drug crisis related to stimulant abuse has been developing in the shadows. After almost a decade of remaining below its prior peak in 2006, deaths involving cocaine more than doubled between 2015 and 2018 (from 6,775 to 14,652). Deaths involving methamphetamine have been on a steady march upward since 2008, also more than doubling between 2015 and 2018 (from 5,697 to 12,649). By 2018, 25,838 Americans had died from an overdose involving heroin, methamphetamine, or both substances together (a single death may involve multiple substances, including not only these stimulants but also opioids or other drugs).
To put these statistics in some context, the three most important causes of death reported by the CDC in 2018 were heart disease (more than 655,000 deaths), cancer (nearly 600,000 deaths) and unintentional injuries (167,000 deaths). Drug overdose deaths as a category are not among the top ten causes of death, but intentional overdose deaths are counted among the 48,000 deaths attributed to suicide, the tenth leading cause of death.
Visit https://www.nihcm.org/categories/beyond-opioids-rapid-increase-in-drug-deaths-involving-stimulants to read more and see infographics.