More people die after smoking drugs than injecting them, US study finds
NEW YORK — Smoking has surpassed injecting as the most common way of taking drugs in US overdose deaths, a new government study suggests.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called its study published Thursday the largest to look at how Americans took the drugs that killed them.
CDC officials decided to study the topic after seeing reports from California suggesting that smoking fentanyl was becoming more common than injecting it. Potent, illicit versions of the painkiller are involved in more US overdose deaths than any other drug.
Some early research has suggested that smoking fentanyl is somewhat less deadly than injecting it, and any reduction in injection-related overdose deaths is a positive, said the study’s lead author, Lauren Tanz.
But “both injection and smoking carry a substantial overdose risk,” and it’s not yet clear if a shift toward smoking fentanyl reduces US overdose deaths, said Ms Tanz, a CDC scientist who studies overdoses.
Illicit fentanyl is an infamously powerful drug that, in powder form, increasingly has been cut into heroin or other drugs. In recent years, it’s been a primary driver of the US overdose epidemic. Drug overdose deaths in the US went up slightly in 2022 after two big leaps during the pandemic, and provisional data for the first nine months of 2023 suggests it inched up last year.
For years, fentanyl has mainly been injected, but drug users have increasingly smoked it. People put the powder on tin foil or in a glass pipe, heated from below, and inhale the vapor, explained Alex Kral, a RTI International researcher who studies drug users in San Francisco.
Smoked fentanyl is not as concentrated as fentanyl in a syringe, but some drug-takers see upsides to smoking, Mr Kral said. Among them: People who inject often deal with pus-filled abscesses on their skin and risk infections with hepatitis and other diseases.
“One person showed me his arms and said, ‘Hey, look at my arm! It looks beautiful! I can now wear T-shirts and I can get a job because I don’t have these track marks,’” Mr Kral said.