The death toll shot up by 15% to 107,600 in 2021, a rise of almost 14,000 over the 93,655 in 2020, the CDC’s National Centre for Health Statistics (NCHS) said in the report.
The death toll in the first year of the Biden administration continued a worrisome trend from the last year of the presidency of Donald Trump. The previous year, 2020, drug overdose deaths grew by 30% compared to 2019, the CDC's figures said.
More than 70% of the drug overdose deaths were caused by a single substance, fentanyl, which was the fatal agent in 71,238 cases, the CDC said.