Teenagers use drugs less, but more are dying from overdoses
Deaths among teenagers from synthetic street opioids tripled from 2019 to 2021, according to a new study. Experts suspect counterfeit pills are a big culprit.
A new study in JAMA shows that the rate of fatal overdoses among teenagers has tripled from 2019 to 2021.
There’s a phenomenon that, upon first look, seems rather counter-intuitive: The rate of teen and adolescent drug use has seen substantial declines over the past 20 years. But suddenly the rate of teenagers who are dying from drug overdoses is off the charts. So drug use is low, but deaths are high. How could both things be true?
It’s not that teenagers are going wild, taking more risks and using more drugs than ever before. Rather, it’s that any drug use whatsoever is now far more lethal than it used to be. Teens have always experimented with drugs and maybe it caused problems in their life (as it eventually did in mine, but that’s a different story for a different day). But something different is happening. The overdose crisis hasn’t really hit teenagers until now.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and I’ll keep saying it: We are living in an era of unprecedented contamination in the illicit drug supply.
Here’s Joseph Friedman, a co-author of the new JAMA study: Teenage drug use is not more common, but it is more dangerous.
The latest teenage overdose mortality data are legit scary. From the study:
There were 518 deaths among adolescents (2.40 per 100 000 population) in 2010, with rates remaining stable through 2019 with 492 deaths (2.36 per 100 000). Deaths increased to 954 (4.57 per 100 000) in 2020 and to 1146 (5.49 per 100 000) in 2021. Between 2019 and 2020, overdose mortality increased by 94.03% and from 2020 to 2021 by 20.05%.
The chart below shows that illicit fentanyl and other synthetic opioids account for the bulk of teenage overdose deaths. The chart also demonstrates that deaths from illicit opioids like heroin and prescription opioids like oxycodone have stayed reliably low and flat, then, only in the last few years, deaths from synthetic street opioids like fentanyl suddenly skyrocket.
Experts suspect that counterfeit pills could be major driver of this uptick in teenage overdose deaths. It could also be the case that some teens are intentionally trying fentanyl powder. Or maybe some teens are buying cocaine and it turns out that it’s actually fentanyl and they didn’t know. What points experts toward counterfeit pills is the geographic dispersion of these deaths. The clue is in the chart below that shows where the majority of teen deaths occur.
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