Over 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021, marking an all-time record.
As reported by Fox News, the U.S. recorded an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths last year, according to provisional data released by the CDC Wednesday. The number is a drastic jump from last year, when the CDC estimated 91,799 overdose deaths.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have sharply increased. From 2019 to 2020, overdose deaths increased 31 percent as many Americans were forced to stay home in isolation.
"It's telling us that 2021 looks like it will be worse than 2020," Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, said in November.
In the United States, opioid deaths are usually caused by fentanyl, which the CDC estimates was responsible for 75 percent of the 2021 overdose deaths.
