By Andrew Joseph, Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images, STAT, April 12, 2022
After staying flat for a decade, the overdose death rate among U.S. adolescents nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020 — an alarming climb that continued into 2021, a study released Tuesday showed.
The reasons do not include a surge of children in this group — ages 14 to 18 — using drugs, researchers said. If anything, survey data indicate that fewer teens experimented with drugs during the pandemic.
Rather, a main factor is that the supply of increasingly deadly drugs, which has driven overall overdose deaths to more than 100,000 per year, has trickled into what adolescents are using. What teens may think is an opioid painkiller or Xanax diverted from the legal supply is now more likely to be a counterfeit tablet containing fentanyl or similar synthetic opioids.
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