Louisiana saw nation's steepest spike in drug-overdose deaths between 2019 and 2020

Jeff Adelson And Jacqueline Derobertis
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury deaths in the United States, at nearly 44,000 per year. These deaths have more than doubled in the past 14 years, and half of them are related to prescription drugs.

The number of drug-overdose deaths in Louisiana rose more rapidly than any other state in the U.S. during the 12 months that ended last July, a period that included the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control.

About 1,720 Louisianans died from overdoses during that period, which saw what the CDC estimates to be a record 86,000 overdose deaths. Louisiana's total is 53% more than the number that died during the same time period the year before, a spike twice as steep as the national average.

Much of that surge came in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when orders to isolate may have posed additional dangers and taken a greater toll on mental health that could have spurred more drug use. They also come amid a decade-long increase in overdose deaths driven in large part by fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid whose use has been on the rise in recent years.

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So far, there are a variety of opinions as to what could be causing the increase, but no real consensus.

"I think it would be naïve to not acknowledge the pandemic must have some relationship to this increase, because we were making headway," Jefferson Parish Coroner Gerry Cvitanovich said. "What the exact correlation is, I don't know."

The dramatic increase in overdoses in the first months of last year left Louisiana with 37 deaths from drugs for every 100,000 people, the eighth-highest rate among states. A year earlier, 17 states had higher rates of overdose deaths.

While the pandemic likely played a role in the steep jump, other states that were hard hit in the virus's first wave and saw lockdowns that were in some cases even stricter than Louisiana's, such as New York and California, saw much slower increases in the rate of overdose deaths.

In Lafayette Parish, there was a 51% increase in overdose deaths last year. Eighty-three people died from a drug overdose in 2020, compared with 55 in 2019.

In East Baton Rouge Parish, the number of fatal overdoses almost doubled between 2019 and 2020, according to numbers provided by the coroner's office. There were 126 deaths in 2019 and 245 in 2020, with the deadliest spikes happening during the summer months in both years.

"We've always been on a trajectory where the death number got a little higher each year," said East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner William "Beau" Clark. "Nearly doubling is frightening."

Clark said the coronavirus pandemic has kept people isolated from support systems, cut off access to treatment resources and isolated them from friends and family.

However, Clark emphasized that the opioid epidemic has been in full swing for the better part of a decade. Heroin began to filter into the community around 2012 and 2013, followed by the arrival of fentanyl in 2016. Fentanyl became the dominant drug in overdose deaths in the parish in 2019 — often mixed with other drugs to produce a deadly effect.

"The era of fentanyl, which is way more potent than heroin, is happening," Clark said. "People are just going to buy the white powder. They have no idea if it's heroin, fentanyl or both."

His office has even investigated deaths in which people who generally use stimulants end up dying of "massive fentanyl overdoses." In these cases, Clark says people purchase a drug believing it to be methamphetamine or cocaine, and instead end up with fentanyl. Without an opioid tolerance, their bodies are not prepared.

Victims who had received fentanyl when they thought they were taking other drugs, such as Xanax, were also a significant issue in Jefferson Parish, Cvitanovich said.

From 2019 to 2020 overdose deaths jumped more than 50% from 154 to 233 in Jefferson, with the number of fentanyl deaths more than doubling in that time.

That could owe in part to disruptions that have made it more difficult to get other drugs and left fentanyl as a more easily obtainable substitute, Cvitanovich said.

But that's led to dealers playing "amateur pharmacist" while dealing with drugs of inconsistent potency, potentially leading to tragedy when they get the dosages wrong, he said. More potential concern is on the horizon: a new type of fentanyl, which is typically used as a large animal tranquilizer, has shown up in the New Orleans area this year.

"I think everybody's got their opinion, but I don't think we've got anything that's backed up by true science other than what the overdoses are being caused by," he said.