Drug Overdose Mortality: The Continuing Tragedy in America, 1999-2022
High-level results from the newly-finalized CDC data, with monthly deaths
With the finalization of the CDC WONDER database for 2022 U.S. mortality statistics, I will be going through some of the trends that I’ve looked at before (older post links at the bottom).
But first, another substack’s post:
Matt Taibbi’s Racket News has invited Matt Bivens, MD, to write about the opioid crisis in America, and the above is the first piece in a series.
I will have more to say in the podcast to come, as I have suffered from a chronic pain condition since 2010, and my husband Stuart has metastatic cancer which is in his bones, so Stu uses oxycontin for the pain his cancer causes. But more on that next week.
Drug Overdose Trend Continued Its Horrendous Path in 2022
The statistics shown above, the 9% per year average growth in the drug overdose age-adjusted death rate for 1999-2017, and the 57% total increase from 1999 to 2021, are the same as I showed last year.
But I had hoped the finalized stats for 2022 might be level with 2021. It turns out they were a little higher, overall, for the age-adjusted death rates.
Monthly Deaths, Average Daily Deaths, 2018 - October 2023
This one is a bit fraught.
Instead of looking at the annual death rates, I’m looking at the monthly deaths. And, to keep it normalized for the different month lengths, I divided by the number of days per month.
(Yes, I adjusted for the fact that 2020 was a leap year.)
From December 2019 to May 2020, the death rate increased 53%.
In just 5 months.
You do see the deaths decreased rapidly to October 2020, but then climbed again to a new peak in April 2021.
Since April 2021, it has stayed at a fairly high peak.
The drop-off in my graph is likely a data artifact from how these external causes of death are reported. There is a much larger lag in how these are recorded compared to other causes of death in CDC WONDER.
More to come later.
"From December 2019 to May 2020, the death rate increased 53%.
In just 5 months."
Do you see what I see? :)