Drug-involved overdose deaths increased by over 500 percent in 2022 according to a study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, with trends attributed to synthetic opioids. National data shows that fentanyl and heroin in particular attributed substantially to the rise particularly since 2014. However, the study also reports that income protection policies, can have a supportive role in preventing fatal drug overdoses.
The findings are reported in the International Journal of Drug Policy. Over 73,000 people died from an overdose in 2020, which subsequently increased to 106,699 people in 2021, a record for the highest number of overdose deaths in one year. And in fact, more recently, we entered a fourth wave of the overdose crisis, characterized by fatal overdoses in the context of polysubstance use.
" Silvia Martins, MD, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Public Health The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated economic hardship; and as a result, the U.S, government enacted income protection programs in conjunction with existing unemployment insurance (UI) to dampen COVID-19-related economic consequences. "In the context of financial and economic stressors which are known to increase overdose risk we hypothesized that we would observe lower levels of overall overdose and opioid deaths given that robust unemployment insurance benefits could be a buffer," said Martins.
, who is also director of the Substance Use Epidemiology Unit of the Department of Epidemiology a.