Fentanyl use drove drug overdose deaths to a record high in 2017, CDC estimates
Every eight minutes, someone in America died of a drug overdose last year
The Washington Post (US)
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Drug overdose deaths surpassed 72,000 in 2017, according to provisional estimates recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That represents an increase of more than 6,000 deaths, or 9.5 percent, over the estimate for the previous 12-month period. That staggering sum works out to about 200 drug overdose deaths every single day, or one every eight minutes. The increase was driven primarily by a continued surge in deaths involving synthetic opioids, a category that includes fentanyl. There were nearly 30,000 deaths involving those drugs in 2017, according to the preliminary data, an increase of more than 9,000 over the prior year.
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