U.S. drug deaths dipped in 2018, but cocaine and meth overdoses rose

Friday, February 21, 2020 - 08:10 in Health & Medicine

The stories that Judith Feinberg hears from people with substance use disorder are riddled with loss: of jobs, opportunity, security, dignity. “People really are struggling to see that they have a viable future,” Feinberg says. “Then you take a drug … and you don’t care until you need the drug again.” For years, that drug was very likely an opioid. But Feinberg, a physician at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown who studies infectious diseases and injection drug use, recently has seen shifts in the addictive substances used. And it’s occurring not just in West Virginia — which has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the nation, at 51.5 deaths per 100,000 people — but across the country, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported January 30. Fueled by a plentiful supply, people have increasingly been turning to such stimulants as cocaine and methamphetamine — so much so that the rates of overdose deaths for those drugs...

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