NEW YORK — Smoking has surpassed injections as the most common method of drug overdose death in the U.S., new government says. study suggests.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention named the study published Thursday the largest study to examine how Americans ingested the drugs that led to their deaths.
CDC officials decided to study the topic after seeing a report from California that suggested smoking fentanyl was becoming more common than injecting it. Powerful illegal versions of painkillers are responsible for more overdose deaths in the United States than any other drug.
Some early research suggests that smoking fentanyl is slightly less lethal than injecting it, and the reduction in overdose deaths associated with injecting is a positive, said the study's lead author. Lauren Tanz said.
But “injecting and smoking both carry a significant overdose risk,” and it's not yet clear whether a shift to fentanyl smoking will reduce overdose deaths in the U.S., says the CDC's Science Study of Overdoses. Tanz said.
Illegal fentanyl is a notoriously powerful drug that is increasingly used in powdered form in heroin and other drugs. In recent years, it has become the leading cause of America's overdose epidemic. U.S. drug overdose deaths rose slightly in 2022 after two large increases during the pandemic, but preliminary data for the first nine months of 2023 show it edged up last year. It suggests that.
For many years, fentanyl was primarily injected, but drug users are increasingly smoking it. Alex Karl, a researcher at RTI International who studies drug users in San Francisco, explained that people place the powder on top of tin foil or inside a glass pipe, heat it from below, and inhale the vapor.
Although smoked fentanyl is not as concentrated as fentanyl in a syringe, some drug users believe there are benefits to smoking it, Krall said. Among them are: People who inject often suffer from abscesses on their skin and are at risk of contracting hepatitis and other diseases.
“Someone showed me his arm and said, “Hey, look at my arm!'' “We can do that,” Krall said.
CDC investigators studied this trend using a national database built from death certificates, toxicology reports, and reports from coroners and medical examiners.
They were able to obtain pertinent data from the District of Columbia and 27 states from 2020 to 2022. From those locations, they obtained information about how about 71,000 people ingested the drug, out of a total of more than 311,000 overdose deaths in the United States over that three-year period. — or about 23%.
Researchers found that from early 2020 to late 2022, the proportion of overdose deaths with evidence of smoking increased by 74%, while the proportion of deaths with evidence of injection decreased by 29%. discovered. Although not as dramatic as smoking-related deaths, the number and proportion of deaths with evidence of sniffling also increased, the study found.
Experts say it's difficult to know exactly how many people die after smoking, injecting, inhaling or swallowing drugs. In some cases, a person may have used multiple drugs in different ways. In other cases, the method of drug ingestion was not determined.
According to the study, among deaths with a specified method of death as of the end of 2022, 23% occurred after smoking, 16% after injections, 16% after snorting, and 14.5% after swallowing.
Tanz said she feels the data is representative of the entire country. The data was collected from states in every region of the country, and all showed an increase in smoking and a decrease in injections. Smoking was the most common route in the West and Midwest, and about the same as injections in the Northeast and South, the report said.
Krall said the study was “generally good” but said there were limitations.
It can be difficult to establish how and why someone died from an overdose, especially if there are no witnesses. Injections may be more commonly reported because they leave marks on the body. To detect smoking, he said, “you would probably have to find a pipe or aluminum foil at the scene and decide whether to write it down.”
Krall also said that many people who smoke fentanyl use straws to breathe in the vapors from the burning powder, and that investigators may have seen the straw and assumed that they had smoked it. He also pointed out that there is.
