A San Francisco man living on the streets displays what he says is the synthetic drug fentanyl, across the street from where San Francisco mayor London Breed just held a news conference introducing legislation in curbing the rise of deadly overdoses in the city.
We are seeing more and more drug problems recently in our society. The use of heroin and methamphetamines are on a deadly rise amongst American citizens.
Why is there such an issue? The answer is simple. The readily easy access to these drugs is astounding.
The amount of fentanyl being such across the southern border during the immigration crisis has reached absorbent numbers. Border control has spoken out amongst this issue, but has yet to have any real solutions from Biden ad his administration.
Over 100,000 drug overdose deaths were reported in the United States during the 12-month period ending April 2021, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed on Wednesday.
That marks a 28.5% jump from the previous year, with deaths from opioids such as fentanyl and psychostimulants such as methamphetamine also increasing, the provisional data from the health agency showed.
“What we’re seeing are the effects of these patterns of crisis and the appearance of more dangerous drugs at much lower prices,” Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse said. “In a crisis of this magnitude, those already taking drugs may take higher amounts and those in recovery may relapse. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen and perhaps could have predicted.”
But the rise of fentanyl, a stronger and faster-acting drug than natural opiates, has made those effects even more deadly, she said.
Increasing use of the synthetic drug caught the attention of experts before Covid-19 hit, but the pandemic may have exacerbated the problem. With international travel limited, synthetics that are easier to manufacture and more concentrated were likely more efficient to smuggle across borders, Volkow said.
The new federal data shows that overdose deaths from methamphetamine and other psychostimulants also increased significantly, up 48% in the year ending April 2021 compared to the year before. They accounted for more than a quarter of all overdose deaths in the latest 12-month period.
While fentanyl was once more popular on the East Coast and methamphetamine on the West Coast, Volkow says both have now proliferated nationwide.
As the country reopens and society returns to some pre-pandemic normalcy, experts say people will continue to die from drug overdoses at very high rates if action isn’t taken to significantly improve access to treatment.
“Even if Covid went away tomorrow, we’d still have a problem. What will have an impact is dramatic improvement to access to treatment,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, medical director of opioid policy research at the Brandeis University Heller School for Social Policy and Management.
“These are deaths in people with a preventable, treatable condition. The United States continues to fail on both fronts, both on preventing opioid addiction and treating addiction,” he said, emphasizing the need for President Joe Biden to deliver on his campaign promises to address the crisis.
Last month, the US Department of Health and Human Services released an overview of the Biden Administration’s plan to combat drug overdoses. It includes measures aimed at addressing opioid prescription practices and removing barriers to treatments, as well as recovery support and federal support for harm reduction strategies.
On Wednesday, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released a model law, providing states with a template to pass their own legislation to improve access to naloxone, a drug that reverses opioid overdoses.
“If we really want to turn the corner, we have to get to a point where treatment for opioid addiction is easier to access than fentanyl, heroin or prescription opioids are,” Kolodny said, referring to medications including buprenorphine.
