The Opioid Crisis: Men Are More Than Twice As Likely To Die From Drug Overdose Than Women
While we’ve all been focusing on the Coronavirus pandemic – from the illness to the mask mandates to the dysfunctional education system to the protests – another crisis has been growing that isn’t getting the same amount of media attention: the opioid crisis.
The opioid crisis was bad enough before the pandemic, but since the world was flipped upside down in 2020, overdoses and overdose deaths have skyrocketed.
Men and the Opioid Crisis
The U.S. now averages about 275 drug-related deaths per day, mostly from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Nearly 92,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020, which was a 30% increase from 2019. It was the highest annual total on record. Preliminary figures suggest 2021 numbers will be even higher.
But there is a concerning truth that is going underreported… Opioids are disproportionately killing our men. American men are more than twice as likely as women to die by overdose. Men 24 to 34 years old are the most likely among all age groups to die from drug-related causes. You could say that the drug-overdose crisis is a crisis of single men.