DEA: Drug overdoses are the single leading cause of injury death in the US

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of injury deaths in the US, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported in its annual National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA), which was released on Wednesday.

The report highlights how heroin is an increasingly dangerous and popular drug in the US and how its use is increasingly linked to prescription drugs.

Illegal drugs coming into the country

One part of the report concentrates on the origin of illegal drugs coming into the country, and the findings are unequivocal:

Overdoses and death

According to the report, 120 people in the US die each day as the result of an overdose and most of of these deaths are attributable to prescription opioids. Deaths from prescription opioid overdoses are more numerous than those for cocaine and heroin combined.

"Drug overdose deaths have become the leading cause of injury death in the United States, surpassing the number of deaths by motor vehicles and by firearms every year since 2008," Rosenberg wrote.

Because of the risk that prescription opioid (CPD) users are more likely to move on to heroin (we previously reported that people who are addicted to painkillers are 40 times as likely to get hooked on heroin, according to a CDC report), and the high number of CPD overdoses, CPD and heroin were both ranked as "the most significant drug threats to the United States," by the DEA report.

To establish its findings, the DEA considered and analyzed an array of factors such as drug arrests, drug purity, and laboratory analyses. It also considered information about the involvement of criminal organizations and survey data provided by 1,105 state and local law enforcement agencies.

New dangers and old classics

The report also mentions one of the newest, most devastating drug on the market: Fentanyl.

The synthetic opioid is "approximately 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine, and 25 to 40 times more potent than heroin," and was initially developed for cancer patients. It's now being used in combination with heroin.

In September in Chicago, 75 people overdosed over a three-day span. The overdoses were linked to a batch of heroin suspected to be laced with fentanyl. Between 2013 and early 2015, over 700 deaths in the US were linked to fentanyl and similar drugs.

Cocaine use has steadily declined over the last ten years and users are also starting to switch to methamphetamine because cocaine has become harder to come by since its availability started to decline in 2007, according to the DEA report.

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