US overdose deaths appear to rise amid coronavirus pandemic
Matthew Davidson was beating his heroin addiction. The 31-year-old was attending group recovery meetings. He had a restaurant job he liked. He was a doting uncle to a baby nephew.
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. Davidson lost his job. He started staying home alone in his apartment near George- town, Kentucky — depressed and yearning for his recovery support group that had stopped gathering in person, said his cousin Melanie Wyatt.
On May 25, his girlfriend came home to find him dead of a drug overdose.
Davidson was part of a surge in overdose deaths that hit Kentucky this spring. May was its deadliest month for overdoses in at least five years. At the end of August, the state had seen almost as many overdose deaths as it had in all of 2019.
It is not alone. National data is incomplete, but available information suggests U.S. drug overdose deaths are on track to reach an all-time high. Addiction experts blame the pandemic, which has left people stressed and isolated, disrupted treatment and recovery programs, and contributed to an increasingly dangerous illicit drug supply.
Before the coronavirus even arrived, the U.S. was in the midst of the deadliest drug overdose epidemic up: Nearly 74,000 overdose deaths were counted from April 2019 to March 2020, up from the 68,000 reported for the comparable period one year earlier.
“The new CDC data confirms our fears that COVID-19 is exacerbating the already devastating overdose crisis,” said Jules Netherland, who oversees research at the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit that focuses of illicit drug use issues.
The AP reviewed preliminary overdose death statistics from nine states with more recent counts — Colorado, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington. Most included data allowing comparisons to earlier years, and those numbers show overdose deaths outpacing what was reported during the same months of 2019, in some cases by substantial margins.