Fentanyl Use Drives Alarming Increase in Teen Overdose Deaths

Drug overdose deaths have risen sharply among teenagers in the last two years, according to a new study, with fentanyl use driving the increase. A research letter published on Tuesday, April 12, in JAMA that analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed the rate of overdose deaths nearly doubling in the United States for those aged 14 to 18 from 2019 to 2020.

NBC News reported that the rapid increase continued in the first half of 2021 with teen overdose deaths rising by another 20 percent during that period. Joseph Friedman, the research letter's lead author and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles' David Geffen School of Medicine, said that the results represent "a completely unprecedented finding for this group."

Friedman added that over the past 40 years, adult [overdose] death rates have continued to skyrocket exponentially and they have never seen that for teens. He said that teens had very flat, stable overdose death rates, and then all of a sudden that is changing.

Drug overdose deaths grew 30 percent from 2019 to 2020

NPR reported that overdose deaths among the general population in the U.S. grew nearly 30 percent from 2019 to 2020 and rose nearly 12 percent from 2020 to 2021. Those figures are somewhat surprising considering drug use among teens is at a low. According to data from the University of Michigan, just 19 percent of 10th graders reported any illicit drug use in 2021, compared to around 30 percent in 2010 and 2020.

Friedman said the rise in teen overdose deaths is really about drug use becoming more dangerous and not of it being more common. Most teen overdose deaths that were recorded by the CDC recently were caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is up to 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin.

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Bulk of teen deaths due to drug overdose because of fentanyl use

According to the letter, nearly five out of every 100,000 adolescents ages 14 to 18, or more than 950 teens, died due to a drug overdose in 2020. More than 70 percent of those deaths were the result of illicit fentanyl use and other synthetic drugs. That portion rose even further to 77 percent among the nearly 1,150 teens who died from January to June 2021 of an overdose.

Dr. Andrew Kolodny, who is the medical director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, said that the drug supply is so dangerous right now. Kolodny said that trying an illicit opioid just once can lead to that person easily dying of an overdose.

Friedman said that fentanyl has mostly been packaged as a powder and sold as counterfeit heroin in the past. That has changed lately, though, with fentanyl being pressed into counterfeit pills to make it look like prescription drugs. Friedman said that teens nowadays may think they are taking Xanax, Percocet or Vicodin and unwittingly consume the much lethal fentanyl instead.

According to the Associated Press, the chemical precursors to the drugs are being shipped largely from China to Mexico. That is where much of the illicit fentanyl supply is produced in laboratories before being smuggled into the United States.

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